Industrial Automation Magazine India

Distributed Services Architecture (DSA)

Published on : Tuesday 30-11--0001

Distributed Services Architecture (DSA), is an open source IoT platform that facilitates device inter-communication, logic and applications at every layer of the Internet of Things infrastructure. The objective is to unify the disparate devices, services and applications into a structured and adaptable real-time data model.

Functionality     

Distributed Services Architecture (DSA) allows for purpose-built products and services (i.e. DSLinks) to interact with one another in a decentralized manner. This architecture enables a network architect to distribute functionality between discrete computing resources. A network topology consisting of multiple DSLinks running on edge devices connected to a tiered hierarchy of brokers allows the system as a whole to be scalable, resilient to failure and take advantage of all computing resources available to it from the edge, the datacenter, the cloud and everything in between.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is defined as uniquely identifiable objects and their virtual representations in a connected, internet-like structure. The purpose for the existence of IoT is to ultimately have a fully connected world in which all objects are interoperable with one another regardless of manufacturer, specific device characteristics or functionality. This interoperability enables each object to exchange information amongst, affect the state of and augment behavior of itself or other objects in the ecosystem based on a certain set of criteria and configuration parameters.

As the amount of connected objects increases exponentially, so does the variation in their communication methods, configuration parameters and security implementations causing the inability of various objects to be compatible with one another and creating siloed networks of like objects. For a truly connected world, it is important to break down the barriers that inhibit unconstrained interoperability.

The objective of the Distributed Services Architecture is to unify the disparate devices, services and applications into a structured and adaptable real-time data model. The premise of the open-source DSA initiative is to build a community of manufacturers, makers and solution providers that will contribute to an ever-expanding library of Distributed Service Links which allow protocol translation and data integration to and from 3rd party data-sources.

DSA Initiative.