Like many organizations, Bosch is finding its way toward the Internet of Things (IoT). One obvious challenge is the lack of interoperability standards for the IoT. Are we designing the IoT by default? Will the resulting systems have technical, business, and social properties that we can be proud of? Cloud-centric architectures for IoT applications have drawbacks concerning responsiveness, multi-vendor fragmentation, and rampant threats to consumer privacy. We claim that similar levels of service, or higher, can be achieved with a system-of-systems approach.
Bezirk is an architectural framework for the consumer-space IoT being developed at Bosch. By building on a brokerless publish–subscribe middleware and promoting open, decentralized systems, the framework places greater emphasis on interoperability protocols, such as for context awareness and personalization, than on the features of “central” or “indispensable” components. By enforcing a user-centric privacy model at the middleware level, it shifts the power to control data exchanges from companies and application developers to end users.
This talk motivates and describes the framework and showcases applications under development. If your smart home is spying on you, go Bezirk.
