Microservice-based IoT for Smart Buildings

A large percentage of buildings in domestic or special-purpose is expected to become increasingly "smarter" in the future, due to the immense benefits in terms of energy saving, safety, flexibility, and comfort, that relevant new technologies offer. As concerns hardware, software, or platform level, however, no clearly dominant standards currently exist. Such standards, would ideally, fulfill a number of important desiderata, which are to be touched upon in this paper. Here, we will present a prototype platform for supporting multiple concurrent applications for smart buildings, which is utilizing an advanced sensor network as well as a distributed microservices architecture, centrally featuring the Jolie programming language. The architecture and benefits of our system are discussed, as well as a prototype containing a number of nodes and a user interface, deployed in a real-world academic building environment. Our results illustrate the promising nature of our approach, as well as open avenues for future work towards its wider and larger scale applicability.