FedIoT: An Autonomous and Decentralized IoT System Federation Mechanism with Primitive API

Abstract

Current IoT systems are closed and specialized for specific purposes. In the near future, IoT Service Providers (IoTSPs) will emerge to allow providing sensing data observed by IoTSPs to subscribers. This paper proposes a mechanism called FedIoT, in which IoTSPs federate or namely unite in an autonomous and decentralized manner. Subscribers to an IoTSP in an FedIoT system can obtain sensing data observed by any IoTSPs in the FedIoT system. The design principle of FedIoT is analogous to that of the Internet. A FedIoT system is composed of multiple IoTSPs as the Internet is composed of multiple ASs (Autonomous Systems). FedIoT basically provides only sensing data to IoT applications and it depends on IoT applications how the sensing data is utilized as the Internet basically provides data exchange between applications. IoTSPs are interconnected with a unified interface called Primitive API considering operation policy as ASs exchange routing information considering operation policy. FedIoT defines a domain ontology called OntoFedIoT as the unified representation of locations and types of sensor nodes. A proof of concept system is implemented in Go language. The basic performance evaluation in this paper shows that the time required for obtaining sensing data is short enough for practical use.