Contextual variability management of IoT application with xml-based feature modelling

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) can be used anywhere, anytime and with any device. IoT devices are used broadly in recent industry such as health care, transport, education and communication channels. IoT applications make enable the use of IoT systems in different environment such as heat sensor functionality varies for indoor and outdoor, water sensors in automobile for screen viper movement (auto working during rain and stop if there is no raining), heartbeat sensors for old and young patients. Moreover, IoT devices are same but the operating functionality is different according to environment and end user’s perspective. Therefore, this kind of variability management is very important for reusability of resources in multiple environments. However, variability management is difficult task due to the dependency of resources, relationships between them and compatibility issues. Feature Modeling of Software Product Line (SPL) is extensively used to manage the variability management for family of software that share common resources and varies in different points. In this paper we have proposed simple and effective approach for variability management of IoT-based applications by using feature modeling. We have proposed XML-based feature modeling for IoT-based applications for variability management and increase the reusability of existing resources. Our approach defines the complete package from domain modeling to application development by using XML-schema and XSLT files to select and deselect the features for final application development. Our final architecture of IoT-based feature model shows the complete relationships and include exclude associations between them without any constraint violations.