Towards a Software Architecture for Internet of Things based System of Systems

The Smart City vision is becoming a reality with the widespread adaption of Internet of Things (IoT). In this context, several architectural styles like service-oriented and microservice architecture have widely been used in the development of IoT-based systems. However, less amount of work is done for IoT-based system of systems. The recognition of system of systems (SoS) as a system with its unique features such as operationally and administratively independence has been considered a new trend of distributed software systems. The collaboration of the SoS independent system helps to build a larger and more complex system. The characteristics and domain constraints of SoS make some quality attributes critical, especially when SoS is based on IoT. These quality attributes should be considered while designing such systems. To fill this gap, this article presents a novel software architecture based on microservices architectural style, while considering the important quality attributes required for IoT-based SoS. The applicability of the proposed architecture is demonstrated through a smart city case study. In addition, the design quality is evaluated in terms of scalability and maintainability. The results show that the design developed using the proposed architecture is better in terms of these two quality attributes than the existing approach.