Niflheim: An End-To-End Middleware For Applications On A Multi-Tier Iot Infrastructure

The state-of-practice for Internet of Things (IoT) applications is deployment on specialised networks of embedded devices connected to a cloud backend. While this paradigm has successfully supported a range of IoT systems, its power is limited by the high latency and bandwidth caused by communications with remote data servers and the inability to share specialised IoT infrastructure across applications. To improve these aspects, this paper proposes re-imagining all resources of the IoT infrastructure as microservice-hosting platforms. Applications decomposed as a set of services can then share IoT resources and run communicating modules closer together, tightening control loops and reducing latency and communications. To this end, we present Niflheim, a generic end-to-end middleware that provides modular microservice-based orchestration of applications to deploy and manage them on all resources across the tiers of the IoT, from IoT end-devices through gateways to the cloud. This enables increased flexibility in deployment and operations, while remaining efficient in terms of hardware and software requirements. We evaluate Niflheim in a smart building use case and demonstrate improved latency and bandwidth consumption for applications, while enabling efficient shared use of the IoT infrastructure resources.