Niflheim: End-to-End Middleware for Applications Across all Tiers of the IoT

Abstract

The state-of-practice for Internet of Things (IoT) applications is deployment on specialised networks of embedded devices connected to a cloud backend. This paradigm is limited by the high latency and bandwidth incurred by communications with remote data servers and the inability to share specialised IoT infrastructure across applications. Efficiency can be improved by re-imagining all resources of the IoT infrastructure as micro-service 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. This demo showcases Niflheim, a generic end-to-end middleware that provides modular microservice-based orchestration of applications on all resources across the tiers of the IoT, from IoT end-devices through gateways to the cloud. We demonstrate that this enables increased flexibility in application deployment and operations, while remaining efficient in terms of hardware and software requirements.