Osmotic Message-Oriented Middleware for the Internet of Things

Abstract

Message-oriented middleware is a key technology in today's Internet of Things (IoT). Centralized message brokers facilitate decoupled device-to-device communication and can transparently scale to handle many millions of messages per second. However, Cloud-based solutions, such as AWS IoT or Azure IoT Hub, are challenged to satisfy the stringent Quality of Service (QoS) and privacy requirements of many modern IoT scenarios. Such scenarios are complex because they are not only distributed, but dynamic, as elements physically move, fail, and/or (dis-)connect to/from the network. Instead, distributed middleware needs to leverage the everincreasing amount of resources at the edge of the network to provide reliable, ultra-low-latency, and privacy-aware message routing. But the heterogeneity and volatility inherent to Edge resources, and the unpredictability of mobile clients, make it extremely challenging to provide resilient coordination mechanisms and guaranteed message delivery. Applying Osmotic Computing principles to message-oriented middleware opens new opportunities for solving these challenges.