CloudCom '18
Full Paper
Building IoT Systems Using Distributed First-Class Reactive Programming
Contemporary IoT systems are challenging to develop, deploy, and maintain. This is because of their ever-increasing scale, dynamic network topologies, heterogeneity and resource constraints of the involved devices, and failures that may occur as a result of these characteristics. Existing approaches are either not at the right level of abstraction, require developers to learn specialized languages, or miss certain key features to address all these challenges in a uniform manner. In this paper we leverage reactive programming and code mobility to support the entire life-cycle of large-scale IoT systems. Our approach is based on existing programming technologies and offers simple and composable abstractions to developers. We implemented our approach in a middleware called Potato and used it to develop and deploy an IoT application on a Raspberry Pi cluster. We found that using Potato reduces much of the accidental complexity associated with developing and deploying IoT systems, resulting in clean and maintainable programs.
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SPLASH '17
WIP
First-Class Reactive Programs for CPS
Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are comprised of a network of devices that vary
widely in complexity, ranging from simple sensors to autonomous robots.
Traditionally, controlling and sensing these devices happens through API
communication, in either push or pull-based fashion. We argue that the
computational power of these devices is converging to the point where they can
do autonomous computations. This allows application programmers to run programs
locally on the sensors, thereby reducing the communication and workload of more
central command and control entities. This work introduces the Potato framework
that aims to make programming CPS systems intuitively easy and fast. Potato is
based on three essential mechanisms: failure handling by means of leasing,
distribution by means of first-class reactive programs, and intentional
retroactive designation of the network by means of capabilities and dynamic
properties. In this paper we focus on the reactive capabilities of our
framework. Potato enables programmers to create and deploy first-class reactive
programs on CPS devices at run time, abstracting away from the API approach.
Each node in the network is equipped with a minimal actor-based middleware that
can execute first-class reactive programs. We have implemented Potato as a
library in Elixir and have used it to implement several small examples.
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Programming '17
Position Paper
Abstractions for Distributed Event-Driven Applications
The Internet of Things (IoT) requires us to rethink the way distributed event-driven applications are programmed. IoT applications differ from traditional distributed applications on a number of points.
First, they are comprised of an order of magnitude more devices that operate within a dynamic network.
Second, failure in large dynamic networks is no longer an exceptional state but a given and thus needs to be part of the core semantics when programming such networks.
Third, the hardware in these networks is not homogeneous so that a common software stack is impossible.
We believe that contemporary event-driven languages do not offer appropriate abstractions to write IoT applications.
We propose a novel computational model for programming IoT applications by
identifying four key abstractions for designating network nodes and handle failures that facilitate writing large-scale IoT applications.
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