An Event-based Microservice Platform for Autonomous Cyber-Physical Systems: the case of Smart Farming

Nowadays, we are realizing the Internet of Things capabilities as it has found many applications in the social and business life. Myriads of IoT devices have spread in everyday contexts supporting the collection and exchange of accurate, timely and complete information describing our products, cities, houses, farms, warehouses etc. The orchestration of the heterogeneous, connected IoT devices can support a variety of applications serving different business and everyday life purposes. This paper proposes a generic event-based platform that supports a variety of IoT-enabled application scenarios. To achieve scalability and reusability, the microservice paradigm is adopted. The proposed platform's architecture handles and composes microservices as atomic, autonomous and ephemeral functional entities that each reflects a specific application-oriented functionality. They are independent of the technology and the IoT infrastructure in the application domain. An IoT tier handles all the events and communicates the states of the IoT devices with the support of an Events communication channel. The functionality of the platform is demonstrated when supporting a smart farming case where the humidity of an IoT-enabled greenhouse is automatically controlled.