1. Introduction¶
Scorpio Broker is an NGSI-LD compliant context broker developed by NEC Laboratories Europe and NEC India as a part of the FIWARE platform. Basically Scorpio broker is a core component of FiWARE/IoT platform. It implements the full NGSI-LD API as specified by the ETSI Industry Specification Group on cross cutting Context Information Management (ETSI ISG CIM). The NGSI-LD API enables the management, access and discovery of context information. Context information consists of entities (e.g., a building) and their properties (e.g., address and geographic location) and relationships (e.g., owner). Thus, Scorpio Broker enables applications and services to request context information – what they need, when they need it and how they need it.
The functionalities of the NGSI-LD API include: • Create, update, append and delete context information. • Query context information, including filtering, geographic scoping and paging. • Subscribe to changes in context information and receive asynchronous notifications. • Register and discover sources of context information, which allows building distributed and federated deployments.
Scorpio Broker is a FIWARE Generic Enabler. Therefore, it can be integrated as part of any platform “Powered by FIWARE”. FIWARE is a curated framework of open-source platform components which can be assembled with other third-party platform components to accelerate the development of Smart Solutions.
Scorpio Broker makes use of the microservice-based architecture. The main version of Scorpio Broker is built with the Quarkus framework, which offers distinct advantages over existing IoT brokers, including reduced memory consumption, enhanced scalability, seamless cross-technology integration, etc.
Scorpio Broker based on NGSI-LD offers a unique feature of Link data context that provides self-contained (or referenced) dynamic schema definition (i.e. the context) for contained data in each message/entity. Thus allows the Scorpio Broker core processing to still remain unified even it gets dynamic context-driven data as its input from different types of data sources coupled(or designed for) with different schemas.
Key advantages of Scorpio Broker over other brokers:
Uses micro-service architecture which enhances the performance drastically.
The Scorpio Broker architecture is designed & implemented as a scalable, highly available, and load balanced.
Use of LD which gives us the leverage of dynamic context.
Usage of Kafka, allowing us the robust pub-sub service with the facility of scaling with no downtime.
It provides fail-over resiliency.
It provides load balancing to distribute the load on distributed infrastructure.
It is modular enough to offer low coupling and high cohesion by design.
It offers different storage integration without changing the application logic time and again.
Support of different deployment architectures, i.e, Centralized, Distributed and Federated
Integrated support for temporal operation