Blueprint overview/Introduction

ELIOT is "Enterprise Edge Lightweight and IOT" project under Akraino approved blueprint family and part of Akraino Edge Stack, which intends to provide an platform  for a fully integrated edge network infrastructure and running edge computing applications, on lightweight Edge Nodes. ELIOT targets on making the edge node a lightweight software stack which can be deployed on edge nodes which have limited hardware capacity by leveraging lightweight OS, a container running environment and container orchestration applications.

In addition, ELIOT stack focuses to have an infrastructure for edge computing which will enable high performance, high availability, security and reduce latency.

IoT Gateway Blueprint will provide an infrastructure platform for an edge node to run as a IoT Gateway.  This is achieved by leveraging the upstream opensource application like Dockers, Kubernetes , Prometheus , cAdvisor, KubeEdge and EdgeX.  Companies having applications to be deployed on edge nodes related to IoT application , can use the IoT Gateway platform to have a functional end to end to ecosystem of IoT.

Use Case

Many diverse business applications require a converged IoT gateway. In this use case, the plan is to support the following scenarios:

•     IOT sensor application
•     OPC-UA over TSN application  
•     AI Camera Application

Industry Sector: WAN edge, enterprise, diverse IoT applications in various vertical market segments, Carrier

Where on the Edge

Many diverse business applications require a converged IoT gateway.

Business use cases:

1. IoT gateway

• Smart cities
• Smart homes
• Connected vehicles
• Connected farming, agriculture
• Logistics
• Industrial, IIoT

Overall Architecture

ELIOT IoT Gateway Blueprint  Architecture consists of an ELIOT Manager and multiple ELIOT Nodes. The scale of ELIOT (edge) Nodes can range from 1 single node to 10, 100, 1K or more.

ELIOT Manager is the central controller which manages the orchestration, life cycle, management and networking of edge nodes (IoT Gateway). It can be installed on a bare metal server or cloud VM with Ubuntu 16.04 /18.04 or Cent OS 7.5 version.
The node  Kubernetes Master (kubeadm, kubectl, kubelet), Kubeedge-EdgeController is to facilitate auto deploy, high availability, orchestration, self-healing of the IoT Gateway Nodes.

ELIOT Nodes - IoT Gateway are Edge compute processing nodes which will provide the hardware and the software stack for deploying IoT applications. 

The IoT Gateway can function as a Kubernetes worker node or a KubeEdge - Edge node when used as Kubernetes or KubeEdge respectively. IoT Gateway blueprint is integrated with EdgeX foundry platform , thus  giving an platform to deploy IoT applications.

As the edge nodes can have restricted hardware resources of CPU , Memory etc, ELIOT uses ELIOT Minimal OS for the Edge nodes which is basically tailored version of Cent OS.  ELIOT Minimal OS is a lightweight OS suitable for ELIOT Edge nodes.

ELIOT blueprint will use lightweight OS, Lightweight Kubelet -- KubeEdge , lightweight container runtime interface -- like containerd. By this we can leverage the core features of OS, K8S, CRI and make the edge node lightweight and efficient edge computing node by executing edge applications on node and reducing the interaction between Central Controller (Cloud Node) and the Edge Node devices.

Many cloud native monitoring applications can be used to collect container matrix and show them in a graphical manner, like cadvisor, grafana , prometheus.

Platform Architecture

<Hardware components should be specified with model numbers, part numbers, etc>

Software Platform Architecture

APIs

Not Applicable

Hardware and Software Management

Licensing

• GNU/common license