Using BPEL to Realize Business Processes for an Internet of Things

Abstract

In the vision of an IoT, trillions of tiny devices extend the Internet to the physical world and enable novel applications that have not been possible before. Such applications emerge out of the interaction of these devices with each other and with more powerful server-class computers on the Internet. Programming such applications is challenging due to the massively distributed nature of these networks combined with the challenges of embedded programming. In addition, resource constraints, device heterogeneity, and the integration with the Internet further complicate this situation. In this paper, we present a programming-in-the-large approach for resource-constraint devices such as wireless sensor nodes. Our approach is to model such applications using the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), which is successfully and widely used in the Internet to model complete applications and business processes. However, BPEL and its associated technologies are too resource-demanding to be directly applied in resource-constraint environments. We therefore use the BPEL model as input to a code generation process that generates custom-tailored, lean code for different target platforms. The resulting code is fully standard-compliant and allows a seamless integration of IoT devices in enterprise IT environments. We present an exhaustive evaluation on real hardware showing the first-rate performance of the approach.