A Comparative Study of Microservices-based IoT Platforms

Internet of Things (IoT) is a set of technologies that aim at fitting together smart devices and applications to build an IoT ecosystem. The target of this kind of ecosystem is to enhance interaction between machines and humans through hardware to software binding while reducing cost and resource consumption. On the application level, IoT ecosystems were implemented by various technologies that all seek better interconnection, monitoring, and controlling of IoT smart devices. Among recent technologies, Microservices, which are a variant of the service-oriented architecture, are subject to great excitement. In fact, Microservices are an emerging technology built around Microservice paradigm which goal is to offer services with a small granularity, which exactly meets the distributed nature of IoT devices while maintaining a loosely coupled architecture between IoT components among other advantages. Efforts to build Microservice-based IoT platforms sooner emerged to take advantage of the numerous benefits of the Microservice paradigm to build scalable, interoperable, and dynamic ecosystems. The goal of this paper is to list these approaches, classify them and compare them using a Weighted Scoring Model (WSM) method. This involves, studying these platforms, establishing relevant criteria for comparison, assigning weights for each criterion, and finally calculating scores. The obtained results reveal the weaknesses and strengths of each of the studied platforms.