Thing Artifact-based Design of IoT Ecosystems

This paper sheds light on the complexity of designing Internet-of-Things (IoT) ecosystems where a high number of things reside and thus, must collaborate despite their reduced size, restricted connectivity, and constrained storage limi- tations. To address this complexity, a novel concept referred to as thing artifact is devised abstracting the roles that things play in an IoT ecosystem. The abstraction focuses on 3 cross-cutting aspects namely, functionality in term of what to perform, lifecycle in term of how to behave, and interaction flow in term of with whom to exchange. Building upon the concept of data artifact commonly used in data-driven business applications design, thing artifacts en- gage in relations with peers to coordinate their individual behaviors and hence, avoid conflicts that could result from the quality of exchanged data. Putting functionality, lifecycle, interaction flow, and relation together contributes to ab- stracting IoT ecosystems design. A system implementing a thing artifact-based IoT ecosystem along with some experiments are presented in the paper as well.