Developing Platform-Agnostic IIoT Applications in Edge-Cloud Environments

The huge amount of data generated by IoT devices at the edge of the network poses challenges for centralized cloud platforms due to latency, bandwidth, and scalability issues. The edge-cloud continuum has emerged as a powerful solution, combining edge and cloud computing to process data locally while using cloud resources for intensive tasks. However, the lack of shared standards across platforms leads to highly platform-dependent applications. This paper presents a new framework that leverages abstraction to define platform-independent applications within the edge-cloud continuum. The framework enables the identification of suitable deployment configurations and optimal service selection, ensuring that quality of service (QoS), data locality and security constraints are met. The proposal addresses the challenges of seamless integration across the continuum, contributing to the development of flexible and scalable applications. To assess the effectiveness of the proposed approach, we discussed a case study in the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) domain, demonstrating how it facilitates the development of applications within the edge-cloud continuum.