Leveraging the development of FIWARE-based internet of things applications with IoTVar

Abstract

The rising popularity of the Internet of Things (IoT) has led to a plethora of highly heterogeneous, geographically-dispersed devices. In recent years, IoT platforms and middleware have been integrated into the IoT ecosystem for tackling such a heterogeneity, promoting interoperability, and making application development easier. IoTVar and FIWARE are examples of solutions that provide services to accomplish these goals. However, developing an application atop FIWARE requires a high-level of knowledge of the platform, besides being a time consuming, error prone task. On the other hand, IoTVar provides a high abstraction level to manage interactions between IoT applications and underlying IoT platforms, thus enabling developers to easily discover devices and transparently update context data at low development cost in terms of lines of code. This work presents the integration between the IoTVar middleware and FIWARE platforms, providing application developers with the possibility to declare FIWARE IoT variables at the client side through IoTVar. Therefore, they become able to automatically use mapped sensors whose values are transparently updated with sensor observations. The integration between IoTVar and FIWARE was evaluated through a development effort assessment comparing used lines of code to declare and manage IoT variables, as well as experiments to measure the overhead caused by IoTVar in terms of CPU, memory and battery.