The Advent of the Internet of Things in Airfield Lightning Systems: Paving the Way from a Legacy Environment to an Open World

This paper discusses the design and prototype implementation of a software solution facilitating the interaction of third-party developers with a legacy monitoring and control system in the airfield environment. By following the Internet of Things (IoT) approach and adopting open standards and paradigms such as REpresentational State Transfer (REST) and Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) for message dispatching, the work aims at paving the way towards a more open world in the airfield industrial sector. The paper also presents performance results achieved by extending legacy components to support IoT standards. Quantitative results not only demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed solution, but also its suitability in terms of prompt message dispatching and increased fault tolerance.