Cuttlefish: A Flexible and Lightweight Middleware for Combining Heterogeneous IoT Devices

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) extends connectivity beyond traditional computing devices to different types of smart objects, equipped with various sensors and actuators. These objects range from smart lightbulbs and thermostats to smart watches and fitness trackers, or even heavy machinery used in various industrial sectors. Due to device heterogeneity, the complexity of developing applications that require the collection and sharing of data across multiple IoT devices is high, as developers need to be familiar with a diverse set of supported services and APIs. While existing approaches have proposed solutions to this challenge, they rely on the use of resource-intensive cloud-based components, they do not offer the degree of extensibility desired by developers, and they often trade off some of the richness of real-time data for ease of use. Cuttlefish is a flexible and lightweight middleware that offers a unified API to help with the development of applications that utilize multiple heterogeneous IoT devices. It abstracts away much of the complexity involved with orchestrating different devices at runtime. At the same time, it avoids the aforementioned caveats of existing approaches through a simple and efficient design, yet one that offers a rich set of capabilities to developers.