Towards Rapid and Cost-Effective Prototyping of IoT Platforms

Rapid prototyping of IoT platforms is essential for developers to obtain first-mover advantage, validate feasibility of innovative ideas and the key technologies. In this paper, we present TinyLink, an approach for rapid and cost-effective prototyping of IoT platforms. With TinyLink, developers can specify the key platform functionalities and let TinyLink deal with the details of hardware components. Then TinyLink creates user constraints from the functionalities, as well as the inherent hardware constraints. The high level goal is to automatically select the hardware components so that they can satisfy the user requirements with the lowest cost. TinyLink solves the optimization problem and outputs a list of hardware components. We implement TinyLink and evaluate it using real-world IoT platform requirements. Results show that TinyLink achieves a lower cost compared with an existing IoT application, without affecting the functionalities of the platform.