A Reconfigurable Microservice-Based Migration Technique for IoT Systems

An Internet of Things (IoT) system is often an integration of a large number of hardware and software modules, which are expected to be easily replaced or reconfigured in order to cater for quickly-changing environments and requirements. With the popularity of microservices, people have attempted to introduce the microservice architecture to IoT systems, while paid little attention to the connectivity between the decomposed microservices, resulting in poor reconfigurability of the resulting system. In this paper, we propose a reconfigurable microservice-based migration technique for IoT systems, which first decomposes an IoT system as a set of microservices and then introduces variation contexts to make the decomposed microservices reconfigurable. We have conducted a case study on an open-source real-life unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) system. The results demonstrate that the migrated UAV system can be dynamically reconfigured to handle various run-time changes.