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M. Claeßens:
"Automated Application Deployment in heterogeneous IoT Environments by OpenTOSCA";
Supervisor: S. Dustdar, F. Li, M. Vögler; Institut für Informationssysteme, Distributed Systems Group, 2014.

Today's Internet of Things (IoT) landscape is fragmented by proprietary solutions offered by different vertical industries. Gateway application environments were introduced to integrate the domain- and vendor-specific communication protocols, data models, and control devices with management level business processes. But rather than reducing the heterogeneity, they introduced additional, often proprietary communication protocols. Furthermore, the automation of application deployment in IoT framework environments is barely supported and the management procedures are not portable due to the lack of standardization. Thus, the operation of IoT solutions requires time consuming manual configuration and detailed knowledge about each gateway framework in use. Interestingly, quite similar problems appeared in the domain of cloud applications. The absence of standardized APIs led to heterogeneous cloud environments making vendor-specific application life-cycle management procedures necessary. Porting these procedures to a new environment resulted in a cost and time intensive task. The portability problem in cloud environments was perceived by industry and academics, leading to the OASIS Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA), which provides a meta-model to define the topology of applications and their life-cycle management in a portable way. The goal of this work is to investigate how TOSCA can be applied to the IoT domain to automate application deployment and life-cycle management in a portable and reusable way. The structure of IoT applications is composed of reusable components which capture detailed management knowledge. Their behaviour is defined by life-cycle management procedures which are defined in a portable and interoperable way. Furthermore we show how the device virtualization proposed in the IoT PaaS architecture can be accomplished by applying TOSCA. To show the feasibility of this approach, a prototype that implements a building automation use case is developed, based on the OpenTOSCA runtime environment. The prototypical application consists of two Air Handling Unit (AHU) instances which are deployed onto two distinct gateway frameworks - Sedona and Niagara.