CHARIOT: Goal-Driven Orchestration Middleware for Resilient IoT Systems

An emerging trend in Internet of Things (IoT) applications is to move the computation (cyber) closer to the source of the data (physical). This paradigm is often referred to as edge computing. If edge resources are pooled together, they can be used as decentralized shared resources for IoT applications, providing increased capacity to scale up computations and minimize end-to-end latency. Managing applications on these edge resources is hard, however, due to their remote, distributed, and (possibly) dynamic nature, which necessitates autonomous management mechanisms that facilitate application deployment, failure avoidance, failure management, and incremental updates. To address these needs, we present CHARIOT, which is orchestration middleware capable of autonomously managing IoT systems consisting of edge resources and applications. CHARIOT implements a three-layer architecture. The topmost layer comprises a system description language, the middle layer comprises a persistent data storage layer and the corresponding schema to store system information, and the bottom layer comprises a management engine that uses information stored persistently to formulate constraints that encode system properties and requirements, thereby enabling the use of satisfiability modulo theory solvers to compute optimal system (re)configurations dynamically at runtime. This article describes the structure and functionality of CHARIOT and evaluates its efficacy as the basis for a smart parking system case study that uses sensors to manage parking spaces.