SDG-Pro: a programming framework for software-defined IoT cloud gateways

Abstract

Recently, emerging IoT cloud systems create numerous opportunities for a variety of stakeholders in terms of optimizing their existing business processes, as well as developing novel cross-organization and cross-domain applications. However, developers of such systems face a plethora of challenges, mainly due to complex dependencies between the application business logic and the underlying IoT cloud infrastructure, as well as difficulties to provision and govern vast, geographically distributed IoT cloud resources. In this paper, we introduce SDG-Pro – a novel programming framework for software-defined IoT cloud systems. The main features of our framework include programming abstractions: Software-Defined Gateways, Intents, Intent Scopes, and Data and Control Points, as well as provisioning and governance APIs that allow for programmatic management of software-defined gateways throughout their entire lifecycle. The SDG-Pro framework enables easier, efficient and more intuitive development of IoT cloud applications. It promotes the everything-as-code paradigm for IoT cloud applications in order to provide a uniform, programmatic view on the entire development process. To illustrate the feasibility of our framework to support development of IoT cloud applications, we evaluate it using a real-world case study on managing fleets of electric vehicles.