Self-adaptive Device Management for the IoT Using Constraint Solving

In the context of IoT (Internet of Things), Device Management (DM), i.e., remote administration of IoT devices, becomes essential to keep them connected, updated and secure, thus increasing their lifespan through firmware and configuration updates and security patches. Legacy DM solutions are adequate when dealing with home devices (such as Television set-top boxes) but need to be extended to adapt to new IoT requirements. Indeed, their manual operation by system administrators requires advanced knowledge and skills. Further, the static DM platform — a component above IoT platforms that offers advanced features such as campaign updates / massive operation management — is unable to scale and adapt to IoT dynamicity. To cope with this, this work, performed in an industrial context at Orange, proposes a self-adaptive architecture with runtime horizontal scaling of DM servers, with an autonomic Auto-Scaling Manager, integrating in the loop constraint programming for decision-making, validated with a meaningful industrial use-case.