Gustav Engström, Victor Gunnarsson:
Adaptive Synchronization and Orchestration: Tackling Offline and Intermittent Connectivity in IoT Environments,
summary, report, December 2023.

Abstract:

Tetra Pak utilizes Azure IoT Edge for their configuration management and orchestration. Factories and machines are connected to IoT Edge devices that run IoT Runtimes with an EdgeAgent that orchestrates Tetra Pak’s containerized software and handles configuration management. The configuration management is done through digital twin technology; each device has a twin stored in the cloud and one locally. When the cloud twin changes, the EdgeAgent detects this and applies the new configuration.

However, transitioning to an IoT solution has introduced several challenges. Many customers operate in rural areas without internet connection, and some do not allow cloud connections. When customers do not have internet access, updating their IoT Edge devices is impossible. In order to solve this, Azure IoT Edge was analyzed to see if its capabilities could be extended. Despite some success, Microsoft’s IoT Identity service hindered offline updates, as it needs a connection to the cloud in order to verify new identities.

This led us to conclude that there was no way to support offline updates using Azure IoT Edge. As a result, we developed a requirements specification and a proof of concept of how configuration and container orchestration can be handled offline while maintaining the digital twin architecture.