Transparent Rule Enablement Based on Commonization Approach in Heterogeneous IoT Edge Networks

The paradigm of the Internet of Things (IoT) and edge computing brings a number of heterogeneous devices to the network edge for monitoring and controlling the environment. For reacting to events dynamically and automatically in the environment, rule-enabled IoT edge platforms operate the deployed service scenarios at the network edge, based on filtering events to perform control actions. However, due to the heterogeneity of the IoT edge networks, deploying a consistent rule context for operating a consistent rule scenario on multiple heterogeneous IoT edge platforms is difficult because of the difference in protocols and data formats. In this paper, we propose a transparent rule enablement, based on the commonization approach, for enabling a consistent rule scenario in heterogeneous IoT edge networks. The proposed IoT Edge Rule Agent Platform (IERAP) deploys device proxies to share consistent rules with IoT edge platforms without considering the difference in protocols and data formats. Therefore, each device proxy only considers the translation of the corresponding platform-specific and common formats. Also, the rules are deployed by the corresponding device proxy, which enables rules to be deployed to heterogeneous IoT edge platforms to perform the consistent rule scenario without considering the format and underlying protocols of the destination platform.