Towards a Model-driven Performance Prediction Approach for Internet of Things Architectures

abstract

Indisputable, security and interoperability play major concerns in Internet of Things (IoT) architectures and applications. In this paper, however, we emphasize the role and importance of performance and scalability as additional, crucial aspects in planning and building sustainable IoT solutions. IoT architectures are complicated system-of-systems that include different developer roles, development processes, organizational units, and a multilateral governance. Its performance is often neglected during development but becomes a major concern at the end of development and results in supplemental efforts, costs, and refactoring. It should not be relied on linearly scaling for such systems only by using up-to-date technologies that may promote such behavior. Furthermore, different security or interoperability choices also have a considerable impact on performance and may result in unforeseen trade-offs. Therefore, we propose and pursue the vision of a model-driven approach to predict and evaluate the performance of IoT architectures early in the system lifecylce in order to guarantee efficient and scalable systems reaching from sensors to business applications.