COMPaaS Middleware

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COMPaaS Middleware

COMPaaS (Cooperative Middleware Platform as a Service) is an IoT middleware system [3] that has been tailored to support the 5G technology integration. Basically, the goals of the COMPaaS can be summarized as follow:

• ∙ Abstraction of the integration and interoperation between applications and physical devices through the provision of hierarchical system services according to device profiles (i.e., a set of functional characteristics describing each physical device).
• ∙ Abstraction of the collection and management of data provided by physical devices through the provision of application-level services.
• ∙ Provision of high-level services to facilitate the development and integration of IoT applications.
• ∙ Provision of a software architecture based on IoT/M2M and WoT (Web of Things) standards.

 

Fig. 5 COMPaaS architecture

COMPaaS architecture is based on SOA approach [4] and is composed of two main systems according to Fig. 5: “Middleware” and “Logical Device”. Logical Device is the system responsible for hiding all the complexity of physical devices and abstracts the functionality of these devices to the upper layer. Both systems are explained in the next topics.

∙ Middleware: Middleware is the system responsible for abstracting the interaction between applications and devices and also for hiding all the complexity involved in these activities. It provides an API to be used by applications in order to use the services of the COMPaaS. The main functions of the middleware range from data management to device integration and address the provision of high-level services to applications. Figure 6 presents the organization of the modules of the middleware. All services are part of the middleware API available to applications, except the communication service, which is used for both applications and logical devices. The rest of the modules (Resource Manager, Resource Handler, and Event Handler) allows the integration with logical device(s).

∙ Logical Device: This is the middleware abstraction for the physical devices that are relevant to the applications and that must be accessible to provide some ben- efit. Logical Devices are described through system profiles. Each system profile

Fig. 6 Modules of the COMPaaS

 

contains attributes to characterize the physical device, such as: name, manufac- turer, function, model, data type, URI, etc. These attributes are used by appli- cations to find the desired devices. Besides the profile, logical device also con- tains two more system elements: communication module and service module. The communication module is not only responsible for the publication of the resource (the registration of the resource in the middleware), but also for the provision of the features for data communication and for notification of the operational sta- tus of the resource to the middleware. On the other hand, the service module is responsible to expose the interfaces and features of the resource to the middleware.

The imminent coexistence of IoT and 5G will demand for more advanced middle- ware systems that can cope with the challenges mentioned in Sect. 3.3. In the next items we describe how COMPaaS middleware has evolved to address a 5G-based IoT middleware perspective.