Revisiting Service-Oriented Architecture for the IoT: A Middleware Perspective

By bridging the physical and the virtual worlds, the Internet of Things (IoT) impacts a multitude of application domains, among which smart cities, smart factories, resource management, intelligent transportation, health and well-being to name a few. However, leveraging the IoT within software applications raises tremendous challenges from the networking up to the application layers, in particular due to the ultra-large scale, the extreme heterogeneity and the dynamics of the IoT. This paper more specifically explores how the service-oriented architecture paradigm may be revisited to address challenges posed by the IoT for the development of distributed applications. Drawing from our past and ongoing work within the MiMove team at Inria Paris, the paper discusses the evolution of the supporting middleware solutions spanning the introduction of: probabilistic protocols to face scale, cross-paradigm interactions to face heterogeneity, and streaming-based interactions to support the inherent sensing functionality brought in by the IoT.