MSMIoT: An Efficient Microservice-based Middleware architecture for the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is becoming prevalent in the most promising domains like smart cities, healthcare, industrial automation, etc. Hence, the scalable and reliable middleware architecture design is the prime need for the adoption of IoT. An essential task of middleware is to abstract the underlying complexity of hardware to the services by facilitating the developer to develop software and services. The service orientation middleware approach is promising for addressing the challenges of the middleware of IoT. Microservices are radically popular in implementing SOA with different perspectives and goals. In this paper, we present a MicroService-based Middleware architecture for IoT (MSMIoT) that is modular and provides an accessible interface to applications and addresses known challenges like heterogeneity, scalability, interoperability, reliability, availability, context awareness, security, transparency, and abstraction to applications. We evaluated our proposed architecture for different traffic rates. Finally, the results show that the proposed architecture outperforms the traditional approach by a gain of 10-15 % in the case of throughput and a decrease in latency by 15-20 %.