Drop the Phone and Talk to the Physical World: Programming the Internet of Things with Erlang

We present ELIOT, an Erlang-based development framework expressly conceived for heterogeneous and massively decentralized sensing/actuation systems: a vision commonly regarded as the “Internet of Things”. We choose Erlang due to the functional high-level programming model and the native support for concurrency and distributed programming. Both are assets when developing applications as well as system-level functionality in our target domain. Our design enriches the Erlang framework with a custom library for programming sensing/actuation distributed systems along with a dedicated run-time support, while we wipe off unnecessary language and run-time features. We couple the resulting platform with adhoc tools for simulation and testing, supporting developers throughout the development cycle. We assess our solution by implementing three sensor network distributed protocols. A comparison with traditional sensor network programming platforms demonstrates the advantages in terms of terseness of code, readability, and maintainability.