An automatic approach for transforming IoT applications to RESTful services on the cloud

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) devices are prevalent in all aspects of our lives, e.g., thermostat and smart lights. Nowadays, IoT devices are controlled by various end-user applications. There is a lack of a standard interface that allows the communication among various IoT devices. In this context, the functionalities of IoT devices may be published as IoT services. IoT services are RESTful services that connect to IoT devices. The uniform interface of IoT services allows them to be integrated with existing applications. We propose an approach that automatically transforms functionalities of IoT devices to IoT services hosted on the cloud. Our approach identifies the code methods from IoT applications that have to be transformed and also extracts service specifications (e.g., input/output parameters) from these methods. Our case study result shows that our approach obtains a precision and a recall above 70%. The identified methods and service specifications are converted to IoT services. Our approach generates IoT services with an accuracy of 96%.