Internet of Things Multi-protocol Interoperability with Syntactic Translation Capability

Abstract

Because Internet of Things (IoT) systems contain different devices, infrastructures, and data formats; its success depends on the realization of full interoperability among these systems. Interoperability is a communication challenge that affects all the layers of the system. In this paper, a transparent translator to solve interoperability issues in two layers of an IoT system is proposed. The communication protocol layer is the first layer. In this layer, it is necessary to overcome the difference between the interaction patterns, such as request/response and publish/subscribe. The second layer includes the syntactic layer, which refers to data encoding. This type of interoperability is achieved through the semantic sensor network (SSN) ontology. Tests and evaluations of the proposed translator in comparison with a similar translator were performed using the constrained application protocol (CoAP), message queuing telemetry transport (MQTT) protocol, and hypertext transfer (HTTP) protocol, in addition to different data formats, such as JSON, CSV, and XML. The results reveal the efficiency of the proposed method in terms of application protocol interoperability. In addition, the suggested translator has the added feature that it supports different data encoding standards as compared to the other translator.