Toward interoperability for the Internet of Things with meta-hubs

TL;DR

This paper proposes an extension to existing IoT middleware platforms using RESTful APIs and IoT feeds to improve interoperability and data management across heterogeneous IoT hubs, demonstrated through an Android implementation.

Contribution

It introduces a novel extension framework that enhances existing IoT systems with dynamic data flow management and meta-hub integration, without creating new middleware.

Findings

Feasibility demonstrated on Android platform

Enhanced data flow control via RESTful API

Improved interoperability among heterogeneous IoT hubs

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) envisions that objects may be connected to the Internet, producing and consuming data in real-time. Today, numerous middleware platforms are available to facilitate the communication with these objects. Unfortunately, the interoperability of these platforms is very limited because it requires to "manually" connect the services proposed by each platform. One key design goal for our contribution is not to build yet another middleware, but rather to augment the functionalities of existing systems via an extension to support their integration into a network of heterogeneous IoT hubs. The extension includes a RESTful API to manipulate the basic component of our extension, the IoT feeds. The IoT feeds allow the platform's owner to dynamically marshal the IoT features connected to the platform, as well as the data that they produce. Furthermore, the feeds enable the owner to manage and control the data flows before connecting them to his applications. Subsequently, these feeds may also be published to meta-hubs in order to expose them to third parties. We evaluated an implementation our extension for Android systems to show the feasibility of managing the data flows using the RESTful API on this platform.