Drop the phone and talk to the physical world: Programming the internet of things with Erlang

Abstract

Abstract-We present ELIOT, an Erlang-based development framework expressly conceived for heterogeneous and massively decentralized sensing/actuation systems: a vision commonly regarded as the "Internet of Things". We choose Erlang due to the functional high-level programming model and the native support for concurrency and distributed programming. Both are assets when developing applications as well as systemlevel functionality in our target domain. Our design enriches the Erlang framework with a custom library for programming sensing/actuation distributed systems along with a dedicated run-time support, while we wipe off unnecessary language and run-time features. We couple the resulting platform with adhoc tools for simulation and testing, supporting developers throughout the development cycle. We assess our solution by implementing three sensor network distributed protocols. A comparison with traditional sensor network programming platforms demonstrates the advantages in terms of terseness of code, readability, and maintainability.

Libraries in Internet of Things (IoT) era

“…The Internet of Things (IoT) connects heterogeneous and massively decentralized devices, such as domestic appliances, actuators, sensors and wireless communications platforms, to the internet and facilitates their communication to accomplish some objective (Castellani et al, 2011;Cirani et al, 2015;Fazackerley et al, 2015;Lai et al, 2017;Li et al, 2015Li et al, , 2018Sivieri et al, 2012;. Built on radio-frequency identification (RFID), near-field communication (NFC) and sensor networks, IoT runs middleware and searching software (Whitmore et al, 2015).…”

An Architecture for Reliable Industry 4.0 Appliances

“…The idea here is to use functional programming and especially the Erlang ecosystem (OTP) to get the benefit of reliable crash and change resistant application architectures in IoT, especially industrial IoT applications (Sivieri et al, 2012).…”

“…Applications like this are especially well suited to using functional languages like Erlang (Sivieri et al, 2012). There are case studies (Haenisch, 2016) that support this assumption.…”

“…Thus, unikernels running on a widely used lightweight hypervisor like Xen (https://www.xenproje ct.org/) seem to be the way to go, especially if platforms like LING (http://erlango nxen.org/) are used, which run an application platform, in this case Erlang/ OTP directly on Xen (Sivieri et al, 2012).…”

A Case Study on Using Functional Programming for Internet of Things Applications

“…Concurrent event sources, e.g. sensor modules, unreliable communication with spurious errors because of wireless data transmission and a system that has to work highly reliable under any of these problems, for a discussion of the relevance of these properties in IoT applications see (Sivieri et al, 2012). Even if some sensors in a building or a factory setting are not working correctly, the data and data transformation must continue at least with the undisturbed data, the main control flow must not be affected by errors in other parts of the system.…”