Bridging Physical and Digital Realities: Towards Standardised and Synchronised IoT Orchestration

Accomplishing the IoT vision of ubiquitous digitalisation requires the autonomous management of dense device networks spanning the IoT computing continuum, from the Cloud to the IoT Device layer. The community is exploring orchestration to address this challenge, with Kubernetes emerging as a prominent tool due to its maturity, open-source nature, and increasing adoption. However, current efforts overlook two fundamental bridging aspects in IoT continuum orchestration, which affect the scheduler and lifecycle management effectiveness: (1) the standard-based digital representation of IoT devices; and (2) the synchronisation between their physical and digital states. This paper focuses on these aspects, proposing a high-level architecture and research directions to address them.