A Distributed Service Framework for the Internet of Things

This article introduces distributed service framework (DSF), a distributed service framework supporting development, and deployment of trustworthy and privacy-preserving distributed Internet of Things (IoT) and Industrial IoT (IIoT) applications. DSF provides a common protocol and infrastructure for secure service specification, registration, discovery, publishing, and subscription, over insecure public networks, and introduces mechanisms for service replication, supporting dynamic scalability of services, and delegation, allowing use on embedded and resource-constrained devices. DSF is an open protocol, with an open-source implementation including supporting library for application development, a command-line client for user interaction, and a daemon that manages services and data. DSF is qualitatively evaluated against existing approaches to developing distributed applications and common technologies used in the IIoT context and demonstrated through the development of an IIoT scenario.