Internet of things out of the box: Using TOSCA for automating the deployment of IoT environments

The automated setup of Internet of Things environments is a major challenge due to the heterogeneous nature of the involved physical components (i.e., devices, sensors, actuators). In general, IoT environments consist of (i) physical hardware components, (ii) IoT middlewares that bind the hardware to the digital world, and (iii) IoT applications that interact with the physical devices through the middlewares (e.g., for monitoring). Setting up each of these requires sophisticated means for software deployment. In this paper, we enable such a means by introducing an approach for automated deployment of entire IoT environments using the Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications standard. Based on topology models, all components involved in the IoT environment (devices, IoT middlewares, applications) can be set up automatically. Moreover, to enable interchangeability of IoT middlewares, we show how they can be used as a service to deploy them individually and on-dema nd for separate use cases. This enables provisioning whole IoT environments out-of-the-box. To evaluate the approach, we present three case studies giving insights in the technical details.