(IJACSA) International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications, Vol. 11, No. 2, 2020 Towards a Dynamic Scalable IoT Computing Platform Architecture Desoky Abdelqawy 1 , Amr Kamel 2 , Soha Makady 3 Faculty of Computers and Artificial Intelligence Cairo University, Egypt Abstract—Internet of Things (IoT) has become an interesting topic among technology titans and different business groups. IoT platforms have been introduced to support the development of IoT applications and services. Such platforms connect the real and virtual worlds of objects, systems and people. Even though IoT platforms increasingly target various domains, they still suffer from various limitations. (1) Integrating hardware devices from different providers/vendors (thereafter referenced as heteroge- neous hardware) is still a subtle task. (2) Providing a scalable solution without altering the end user privacy (e.g., through the use of cloud platforms) is hard to achieve. (3) Handling IoT Applications reliability as well as platform reliability is still not fully supported. (4) Addressing Safety-critical applications needs are still not covered by such platforms. A novel scalable dynamic computing platform architecture is proposed to address such lim- itations and provide simultaneous support for five non-functional requirements. The supported non-functional requirements are scalability, reliability, privacy, timing for real-time systems and safety. The proposed architecture uses a novel network topology design, virtualization and containerization concepts, along with a service-oriented architecture. We present and use a smart home case study to evaluate how traditional IoT platform architectures are compared to the proposed architecture, in terms of supporting the five non-functional requirements. Keywords—Interent of Things (IoT); IoT platforms; IoT archi- tecture; edge computing I. I NTRODUCTION The world is currently changing very fast, jogging to be Smart. Smart Cities [1], Smart Homes [2] and Smart Factories [3] and Smart Grid [4] are bright terms the world is currently looking up to. Internet Of Things [IoT] technology is considered the main player to achieve such aspiration; Gartner [5] reported that by 2020, 95% of new product designs will contain IoT Technology. IoT had been included in the list of six ”Disruptive Civil Technologies” with potential impact on US national power by the US National Intelligence Council [6]. In [7], There will be 50 billion things connected to the internet by 2020 as predicted by Cisco Internet Business Solutions Group. IoT is defined as a network of devices/things coupled with sensors, actuators, software as well as required electronics to make them able to collect, process and share data. From another perspective an IoT is an architectural framework that permits the integration and/or data exchange between the physical world and computer systems through the underlying network infrastructure. This network is orchestrated with what so called an IoT platform. An IoT platform is the key software component that facilitates the development of scalable IoT applications and services that connect the real and virtual worlds between objects, systems and people. As described in [8], such platforms have to meet the expectation of different players in the IoT ecosystem. i.e (1) Device vendors require a standardized communication protocol for seamless integration and operation (2) Application developers need a simplified development support to focus on application development instead of integration and deployment issues. (3) The providers of platforms and related services seek a clean and simplified way to extend and support their services. (4) The end-users demand security and privacy support. More than one hundred of such platforms have been created over previous years [9]. Such platforms come in various shapes, and sizes. Yet, there is still a lack of any defined agreement or a standard to manage such technology (e.g., a standard communication protocol, a standard architecture and deployment methodologies, a defined and dedicated market place. [10]. Therefore, various studies have been conducted in [8], [11], [12] and [10] to evaluate IoT platforms landscape, existing IoT architectures, and assess whether such platforms satisfy the IoT ecosystem needs. Such studies concluded that although existing IoT platforms cover a wide-range requirements for IoT platforms, the following four non-functional requirement still remain relatively unexplored: (1) system-wide scalable dynamic resource discovery, (2) reliability (3) Real Time support and (4) privacy. In this paper, we propose a scalable computing platform architecture, that simultaneously satisfies the above mentioned four non-functional requirements in addition to securing the required support for safety critical IoT Applications. The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. Section II provides a background on traditional IoT platform architectures. Section III presents a motivational scenario for an extendable temporary virtual key management system as a Smart-Home use-case. In Section IV we present our proposed architecture and apply it to the proposed smart-home use-case in Section V. We compare our proposed architecture against traditional IoT architectures in Section VI. Section VII presents the related work, whereas Section VIII concludes the paper. II. BACKGROUND Simply IoT platform could be defined as the enabler platform addressing IoT Full stack. Such IoT stack includes devices/actions/connectivity management, analytic, developer ecosystem, orchestration and open-external interfaces [9]. A classification for IoT Platforms could be done from platform architecture point of view as defined in [8]. www.ijacsa.thesai.org 650 | Page