Increasing the availability of IoT applications with reactive microservices

Developing Internet of Things (IoT) applications and fulfilling their Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements, such as interoperability, scalability, adaptability and reliability, pose multiple challenges. These challenges are imposed mainly by the ultra-large scale of the IoT, the heterogeneous nature of applications and devices and the highly dynamic execution environment. The adoption of the microservices pattern combined with reactive systems principles may contribute to tackle some of these challenges. Therefore, the goal of this work is to propose an architecture based on reactive microservices for the development of IoT applications. The proposed architecture consists of a set of software components, tailored to meet the requirements of IoT applications. In addition, the proposal includes a software platform that materializes several of the architecture components and helps, at runtime, to meet the availability QoS requirement. We applied our proposal in a real-world scenario in the Smart Agriculture domain. The experimental results have shown that our approach improves availability of the IoT application significantly, in comparison to another study.