Whereas HW engineers have been designing concurrent, distributed systems over a range of 60 years, coming from a complexity (counted at the level of a single ASIC) of 1E3 gates in 1974 to 1E10 gates in a recent RISC core, SW designers have been struggling hard to advance the field of distributed computing through a minefield of interprocess paradigms, data distribution solutions and process synchronisation abstractions. In a world where deployments have been moving briskly from single machines to high compute clusters, IaaS cloud computing and finally devices at the edge of the network, what are the big problems faced by practitioners today when designing and operating distributed systems in an Internet of Things environment? We will discuss a number of problems and (ideas to come to) solutions as we have encountered them both in HW and SW in over 10 years of designing and running complex architectures in real-world IoT environments.

Philippe Dobbelaere received his M.Sc. degree in Engineering and Physics from the University of Ghent (RUG), Belgium in 1988.

He has been working for Alcatel-Lucent in various roles covering research, board and ASIC hardware and software design on topics ranging from ATM switches, DSL modems and high speed network processors to advanced software architectures for distributed computing.

Ten years ago he joined Alcatel Lucent Bell Labs (Now Nokia) where his current research interests include distributed computing (and cloud computing), real-time processing in sensor networks and big data (query/deep learning) applications.

Over the last years, he contributed to several Belgian and European funded projects as task or work package leader.

He (co-)authored publications in the M2M and distributed computing domain and holds several EC and USA patents.