The emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm fuel the discussion of how urban environments will bene t from applications of the IoT domain, to name a few, smart grids, smart vertical farm and healthcare applications. Domains likewise vertical smart farm are envisioned to share the same space as people and machines even if humidity and temperature conditions required to grow plants are not ideal to systems room, nor to workplaces, which make the design of these environments even more challenging. Under this point of view more complex concepts such as smart ecosystems (smart cities, smart agriculture and Industry 4.0) ourished. There is still a lack of IoT solutions to integrate services rising new and customized applications. Heimdall is a microservices platform that aim to provide comprehensive services allowing users to storage and visualize data streams gathered by IoT systems. Built to explore continuous integration tools, Heimdall is envision to run a exible and powerful infrastructure able to provide elastic resource. In other words, Heimdall is a solution to power smart ecosystems.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is related to the interconnection of sensing and
actuating devices (named smart objects) with the Internet [
The Smart City concept support the ideal of a city where investments in
human/social capital, technology and infrastructure fuel sustainable development,
enhanced quality of life and culture exchange built by independent and aware
citizens [
A common ground among these concepts is the aggregate value provided by
the collaboration of connected small world composed of smart objects working
collaboratively to enhance the quality of human lives [
Indeed, city, countryside and industry demand di erent solutions of IoT. These solutions should work together in the interest of collaborating as part of an ecosystems. Therefore, it will possible to reach more complex and suitable IoT services. However, there is still a lack of scalable easy to use platform as an environment to support the design of IoT solutions and also aim the creation of smart objects ecosystems able to make feasible the aforementioned abstraction.
This paper provides a holistic view over the enable technologies of the above mentioned scenario and the thought behind Heimdall, a Microservices platform envisioned to support the creation of IoT ecosystems in a scalable, reusable and exible way. The Heimdall proposition is then a reference to platform to support IoT ecosystems. This paper is organized as follow. Section 2 provides a overview on enable technologies. Section 3 discuss existing cloud related products. In Section 4 we present the thought behind Heimdall, section 5 provides future works and a nal remarks. 2
Over the last decade a series of cutting edge technologies have been aggregated to the IoT spectrum. This section present a rapid overview on enabling technologies of the IoT paradigm. These technologies are commonly clustered into two main groups (i) smart objects (e.g. sensors, actuators and embedded communication hardware) and (ii) analytics solutions (on demand storage and data analytics technologies over a cloud computing infrastructure).
Under the things oriented point of view RFID, NFC tags, wireless sensor
networks (WSN) and mobile technologies are among the most promising
technologies to enable the data acquisition and networking layer of the IoT [
WSNs are composed of large number of low cost, low power miniature devices communicating in a wireless multihop fashion. WSNs are able to collect, process environmental data and act based on sensed behavior. WSNs (wireless sensor network) are usually featured as t-for-purpose network designed to attend the requirements of previously known application. Due to its versatile feature, WSNs are envisioned to play an essential role making critical infrastructure components responsible to acquire and semantically improve data, as well as, it provide interoperability with other technologies.
Through the usage of participatory and opportunistic sensing strategies
combined with infrastructure-based transmission or opportunistic transmission
technologies, the Crowd Sensing paradigm appears as a powerful approach to
embody human participation into the IoT paradigm[
Decision making is a process supported by a multifaceted spectrum of
technologies and processes. Thus, Society and organizations are manage by planning.
From the massive amount of unstructured and heterogeneous data collected
about people, actions, sensors and the web arises the challenge to e ciently
manage, analyze and visualize it. A consequence of this are dramatic impacts of
societal and organizational decision making. According to [
Data advancement. Over the years some approaches for a IoT Cloud based platform were made. With focus in providing a service able to extract aggregated value from IoT based solutions Amazon created a set of cloud based products. Among them, AWS IoT Core is a platform that provides interfaces to aid nal users manage its IoT devices. The main objective is to allow secure connection of IoT devices and Cloud Computing applications. Amazon FreeRTOS is an operating system for microcontrollers. AWS FreeRTOS aim to facilitate the programing, deployment, connecting and management of small low-end edge devices. AWS IoT 1-Click is a service made over lambda architecture that enable low-end devices to perform simple tasks. Empowered with publisher-subscribe protocols Google Cloud IoT is a set of integrated services that encompass secure exchange and storage of IoT data into the Google Cloud environment with the objective to use Google Big Query to perform data analytics. Dweet is an online news and social networking service for IoT on which devices post chunks of information in a publisher-subscribe manner. The platform provides a simple web api that enable the user to visualize its things posted information as short messages. 3
The emergence of IoT Ecosystem is envisioned to transform the environment
and the way society organizes itself [
Heimdall is envision as a Ecosystem that reunites favorable conditions for the
SIoT paradigm ourish. Inspired by biological systems, Figure 1 shows how abet
the development of a community made up of organisms interacting and
collaborating in a common environment. In biology, an ecosystem is a unit ooded by
di erent organisms that share the same habitat resources [
The Heimdall platform is the habitat that will favor the creation of these ecosystems and bene ts that services as data collector, database, data visualization, data fusion and others, can be provided, shared and improved progressively. Heimdall microservices are images that can be instantiated to compose a resource in Heimdall. Therefore, a repository service to registry and search microservice should be available. Then, the resources can interact with any other resource though the adoption of specialized communication microservices. As an example of microservice bene ts, as the SIoT solutions are being made available, they can also be improved, adapted and shared as microservices. We should point out that this example also motivated the enhance of SIoT, since give human interaction skill to objects are a complex task that requires hard work. 4
This paper depict some motivations and challenges related to IoT ecosystem and how IoT services could be enhanced when they share a common environment that provide them which interact and collaborating. A microservice platform to support IoT ecosystem (named Heimdall) was also presented and its key aspect was described. Heimdall is a reference microservices platform to support IoT ecosystems in a scalable, reusable and exible way. At the same time, a platform as Heimdall allows users focus manly on the IoT solutions on the level of devices, since they will just need instantiate microservice Heimdall's images. We aim contributing to fuel the development of complex Smart Concepts (smart
Martins et al. ecosystems), in turn, the unfolding the full potential of the SIoT paradigm. As future works we intend to explore the depicted challenges.
As threats to the validity of Heimdall the scarcity of SIoT concrete and good enough solutions and the need of the creation of diverse microservice images useful are important to highlight. As future work we hope to improve the Heimdall repository and turns it available. To do this, we have to de ne some constraints about basic features and interfaces for all new image before they are inserted in the repository. Besides, nowadays the instantiation of images are made through service that requires an expertise. So, an easy to use interface will be created to any user to be able to instantiate microservice images.