A Resource-Oriented Architecture for the Internet of Things (IoT)

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is considered the driving force behind the next Internet revolution, with major technological and cultural impacts. Although the term ``Internet of Things'' has just recently became widespread, IoT relies on several well-established concepts, such as ad hoc and wireless sensor networks, ubiquitous computing, and Cyber-Physical Systems. However, there is still little consensus about how to turn the IoT vision into reality. This chapter presents a resource-oriented architecture for supporting IoT deployments. Resources (the ``things'') are network-addressable objects connected to an IPv4 or IPv6 network core. Border routers in this network can act as gateways to the resources employing non-IP protocols such as wireless sensor protocols based on Bluetooth or ZigBee. The architecture allows resource advertisement and discovering in a totally decentralized way as well as access transparency under resource migration. The architecture relies on OSPF (Open Shortest Path First), a well-established Internet routing protocol, for network-wide resource advertisement. As in ordinary Internet routing, aggregation plays an important role in the proposed architecture. By aggregating resources, scalability and convergence of the resource advertisement process are both favored. A case study in ambient assistive living is presented in order to illustrate the architecture's major components and functions.