Architecture of an Interoperable IoT Platform Based on Microservices

The vision of the Internet of Things enabled the development of a wide spectrum of services, applications and ecosystems, deemed infeasible not long ago. However, lack of standardization poses a number of questions still requiring proper addressing. Due to the need of supporting large number of users and significant data processing throughput, Internet of Things requires a specific approach towards the problem of providing sufficient scalability and performance, clearly pointing towards the distribution of effort among a large number of small and specialized services. Reflecting on the importance of coexistence of heterogeneous systems supporting the Internet of Things, this paper presents an overview of the specific problems inherent to the IoT and the proposal of an architecture of a microservice based middleware aimed at connecting heterogeneous IoT devices. The middleware functionality is achieved irrespective of the size and complexity of a given device network, both from the data model aspect and from the aspect of connecting existing and newly created middleware components.