Transactional properties of compositions of Internet of Things services

Internet of Things (IoT) is about making "things" smart in some functionality, and connecting and enabling them to perform complex tasks by themselves. The functionality can be encapsulated as services and the task executed by composing the services. IoT services have monitoring and actuation capabalities, and therefore their executions may be continuous and involve triggering. These characteristics make the IoT services composition more complex than the conventional software-oriented Web services composition. Transactional properties (atomicity, retriability, compensatability and pivot) have been found useful in Web service compositions, helping modular design and verifiable execution. On the same vein, we study the transactional properties for IoT services composition in this paper. In that process, we come up with new ways of relaxing the atomicity and isolation properties of transactions that will be appropriate for the variety of IoT applications.