Constellation: An Edge-Based Semantic Runtime System for Internet of Things Applications

Abstract: With the global Internet of Things IoT market size predicted to grow to over 1 trillion dollars in the next 5 years, many large corporations are scrambling to solidify their product line as the defacto device suite for consumers. This has led to each corporation developing their devices in a siloed environment with unique protocols and runtime frameworks that explicitly exclude the ability to work with the competitions devices. This development silo has created problems with programming complexity for application developers as well as concurrency and scalability limitations for applications that involve a network of IoT devices. The Constellation project is a distributed IoT runtime system that attempts to address these challenges by creating an operating system layer that decouples applications from devices. This layer provides mechanisms designed to allow applications to interface with an underlying substrate of IoT devices while abstracting away the complexities of application concurrency, device interoperability, and system scalability. This paper provides an overview of the Constellation system as well as details four new project expansions to improve system scalability.