Semantic Gateway as a Service architecture for IoT Interoperability

TL;DR

This paper proposes a Semantic Gateway as a Service architecture that enables interoperability among IoT systems by translating protocols and using semantic annotations for enhanced data understanding and reasoning.

Contribution

It introduces a scalable, multi-protocol IoT gateway architecture leveraging Semantic Web standards for improved interoperability and semantic reasoning.

Findings

Supports translation between XMPP, CoAP, and MQTT protocols

Uses SSN ontology for semantic annotation of sensor data

Enables higher-level reasoning from low-level sensor messages

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is set to occupy a substantial component of future Internet. The IoT connects sensors and devices that record physical observations to applications and services of the Internet. As a successor to technologies such as RFID and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), the IoT has stumbled into vertical silos of proprietary systems, providing little or no interoperability with similar systems. As the IoT represents future state of the Internet, an intelligent and scalable architecture is required to provide connectivity between these silos, enabling discovery of physical sensors and interpretation of messages between things. This paper proposes a gateway and Semantic Web enabled IoT architecture to provide interoperability between systems using established communication and data standards. The Semantic Gateway as Service (SGS) allows translation between messaging protocols such as XMPP, CoAP and MQTT via a multi-protocol proxy architecture. Utilization of broadly accepted specifications such as W3C's Semantic Sensor Network (SSN) ontology for semantic annotations of sensor data provide semantic interoperability between messages and support semantic reasoning to obtain higher-level actionable knowledge from low-level sensor data.