Applying the Web of Things Abstraction to Bluetooth Low Energy Communication

TL;DR

This paper extends the Web of Things framework to Bluetooth Low Energy devices by creating ontologies and bindings, enabling semantic communication over non-IP protocols, with performance comparable to existing tools.

Contribution

It introduces ontologies and JavaScript bindings for WoT over Bluetooth LE, expanding WoT support beyond IP-based protocols in IoT devices.

Findings

Bluetooth LE bindings are 16% slower during connection establishment.

Disconnection latency is about 6% higher with the new bindings.

Read operations have nearly identical performance to existing tools.

Abstract

We apply the Web of Things (WoT) communication pattern, i.e., the semantic description of metadata and interaction affordances, to Internet of Things (IoT) devices that rely on non-IP-based protocols, using Bluetooth Low Energy (LE) as an example. The reference implementation of the WoT Scripting API, node-wot, currently supports only IP-based application layer protocols such as HTTP and MQTT. However, a significant number of IoT devices do not communicate over IP, but via other network layer protocols, e.g. L2CAP used by Bluetooth LE. To leverage the WoT abstraction in Bluetooth Low Energy communication, we specified two ontologies to describe the capabilities of Bluetooth LE devices and transmitted binary data, considered the different interaction possibilities with the Linux Bluetooth stack BlueZ, and due to better documentation, used the D-Bus API to implement Bluetooth LE bindings in JavaScript. Finally, we evaluated the latencies of the bindings in comparison to the BlueZ tool bluetoothctl, showing that the Bluetooth LE bindings are on average about 16 percent slower than the comparison program during connection establishment and about 6 percent slower when disconnecting, but have almost the same performance during reading (about 3 percent slower).