Raphael Hiesgen: Actors for the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) describes a network of interconnected nodes. It relies on machine-to-machine communication to process complex tasks in a highly distributed workflow. These networks are usually connected to the Internet. A challenge in this area is to define a suitable communication layer that provides data exchange and synchronization as well as propagation and mitigation of errors. Handling these problems is a complex and error-prone task. A framework that contributes such a communication infrastructure can professionalize coding and help developers to focus on the application domain. RIOT is the friendly Operating System for the IoT that supports POSIX-style programming in C and C++.

The actor model is designed for distributed systems and offers a message-driven workflow. We provide an efficient middleware layer based on this model that serves as a productive and scalable development environment. However, the actor model can not be applied to this new domain without adjustments. New challenges must be mastered, such as lossy links, erroneous transmissions and security solutions that work on embedded devices. To meet these challenges, we contribute a new network stack for the C++ Actor Framework (CAF) that is based on open standards for the IoT.

The first part of this talk will introduce our design of an adjusted network stack for CAF in the IoT and discuss the major challenges we face here, as well as our approach to solving them. The second part will focus on the process of adapting CAF to RIOT. We will give an impression about the problems that had to be solved and discuss remaining open questions. A simple demonstration will provide evidence of the achievements.

Slides