The world is moving towards a new generation of internet, the internet of things (IoT). This technological jump is improving the way we live by creating a bridge between the physical and the virtual world. Researchers are curious about the field from different perspectives especially managing of the complexity and dynamicity of these systems. The main problem being targeted in this chapter is that IoT systems are exposed to many structural and behavioral changes due to internal and external factors. This study is about the necessity of having a mechanism that enables IoT systems to perform without breaks or shutdowns regardless of context changes. The solution consists of a contextual dynamic reconfiguration process implemented by a reflexive multilayered architecture. This process is based on the autonomic computing loop. The authors also integrated evolution styles to make reusable the reconfigurations applied on the architecture of the system. Validation of the proposed approach was made on an e-health scenario, which was simulated using Cisco Packet Tracer before performing real development.
TopBackground
IoT comes to trigger a revolution in the era of Internet and communication by connecting all surrounding entities together. The environment surrounding them often influences connected objects, they are induced frequently to undergo updates in response to context changing where some objects have to disappear and others will be detected. These changes cannot be foreseen at design time, being applied at runtime, will promote the system and the user with more efficiency and comfort of use.
Several research in ubiquitous computing focus on the analysis of newly developed applications properties including mobility, evolvability and context-awareness. Thus dealing with dynamic reconfirmation of ubiquitous systems (i.e. IoT based systems), our paper scope many aspects including context awareness, reflectiveness and mobility. Supporting real time dynamic adaptations by IoT systems is a property of a tremendous importance. Thus; it should be handled within the development process of such systems because of the multiplicity and variability of context they have to deal with. The concept of context has first appeared associated to ambient intelligence in1991 in Mark Weiser’s work (Weiser, 1991). Dey defines context as “Any information that can be used to characterize the situation of an entity. An entity is a person, place, or object that is considered relevant to the interaction between a user and an application, including the user and applications themselves” (Dey, 2001).
The spread of connected objects in the world of technology is ever increasing. Nevertheless, some questions remain to be settled in order to establish the Internet of Things as a good practice. (Pirotte, 2014) and (Jain 2015) have enumerated some challenges having an immense impact on the good use of IoT like addressing devices, the efficient management of energy resources, sharing and allocation of spaces to store objects in the cloud, the analysis of a very large mass of information coming from a huge number of sensors, heterogeneity and scale invariance, data security and confidentiality and dynamics and high availability.
We address in this work the challenge that concerns the dynamic aspect and high availability of connected objects. Behind this challenge are engendered the occupations cited below.
The main problem dealt with in this chapter is the dynamic reconfiguration of connected object systems at the architectural level. The proposal of a solution on this subject gave rise to several sub-issues: