Building the Internet of Things with OSGi

by Tim Verbelen, iMinds, Ghent University

One year ago, I was speaking on my first EclipseCon Europe about the results of my PhD research (Mobilizing the Cloud with AIOLOS). Since then, I have been working for iMinds as a research engineer. iMinds is a digital research centre in Belgium, which joins the 5 Flemish universities in conducting strategic and applied research in areas such as ICT, Media and Health.

Therefore, iMinds is uniquely positioned to bring together multi-disciplinary teams to work on various emerging topics. I myself am working within the iMinds IoT lab, which works on a wide area of topics related to IoT, ranging from antenna design and wireless MAC protocols, to software security and distributed computing, the last one being my main expertise.

In our research, we try to not only come up with theoretical solutions, but also strive to create tangible results in the form of demonstrations and proof of concepts. As a researcher, you get more freedom in choosing which technology to use in building your solutions, in contrary to in industry, where you are often tied to a lot of legacy software. For IoT, the choice of using OSGi was made early on, which proved to be a good fit for a lot of IoT requirements.

One challenge in IoT environments is the hardware heterogeneity you have to cope with. You need to deploy (parts of) software on a wide variety of devices ranging from embedded devices up to high-end servers in the Cloud. As OSGi was initially designed for service gateways, it is well suited to run on even lower-end devices. The recent work in the Enterprise Expert group also equipped it with a lot of features to operate in a server environment. This makes OSGi a perfect fit as a base for an IoT platform, as the modularity allows you to pick and place the software modules you need on any of your devices.

A second challenge where OSGi really shines is the dynamics you have to cope with when developing IoT applications. As the physical world is constantly changing, you will need to adapt to new devices that are coming online and other devices that disappear at runtime. This is incredibly hard to manage in software as the complexity increases. The OSGi bundle and service model already handles these dynamics and offers the developer a nice and easy way to cope with this using for example Declarative Services.

Third, OSGi offers a nice solution for software distribution with the Remote Services specification. This enables you to delay the decision on which part has to run on which device until deployment time or even at runtime, instead of having this fixed already at development time. This gives you a lot more flexibility in deploying complex applications on a distributed infrastructure.

In order to even better match IoT industry requirements, the OSGi Alliance has recently started anIoT Expert Group, which will build on the already available specification work and where additional IoT-specific RFPs can be submitted to become part of the OSGi specification.

In my talk, I will present and demo some IoT use cases we have developed, and illustrate how we really benefit from using OSGi. If you are interested in OSGi and/or IoT, you are invited to attend my session,OSGi for IoT: the good, the bad and the ugly at EclipseCon 2015 in Ludwigsburg.

Reposted with permission from Tim Verbelen, original post at Eclipsecon Europe 2015