Plug‘n’play IoT devices: An approach for dynamic data acquisition from unknown heterogeneous devices

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is being hailed as the next industrial revolution and promises billion of IoT devices connected to the Internet in the near future. Emerging back-end support technologies not only have to anticipate this dramatic increase in connected devices, but also the heterogeneity of devices. This paper proposes a comprehensive approach for efficiently and rapidly integrating heterogeneous devices during runtime, in order to collect data. The proposed approach identifies both known and unknown devices’ specifications and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), classifies the specifications and illustrates the APIs into ontologies, while the latter are being mapped in combination with the classification’s results to match the known with the unknown devices’ APIs. All of these steps are being performed as preliminary steps for the proposed Dynamic Data Acquisition API, which is the final outcome of the mechanism that is responsible for translating the devices’ APIs into a common format.