An IoT platform for indoor air quality monitoring using the web of things

Abstract

Platforms populating the Internet of Things (IoT) use dedicated software closely coupled with proprietary hardware, devices and interfaces, which creates silos and a lack of interoperability. The Web of Things (WoT) is a paradigm that incentives the use of web standards to interconnect all kinds of devices and defines an application layer for IoT applications. Multiple organizations and consortiums are pursuing the definition of architectures and standards to deliver interoperability to the IoT application layer. Air quality monitoring is a field in which IoT has a great role to play as it is based on different kinds of sensors and devices which monitor air pollution. Quite a few wireless sensor networks have been proposed in the literature to deal with this monitoring process. In this paper, we propose a low-cost, indoor air quality monitoring platform following the recommendations of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) about WoT. The platform is built based on a Web of Things capable of exposing its own Thing Description with 15 to more than 2000 resources, depending on the underlying hardware and the application protocol selected. These resources can serve requests providing measurements of the attached sensors, perform actions on the environment and/or generate events based on these measurements. Although the system is proposed for ambient monitoring, the software architecture developed in this work can be adapted to many embedded applications in the IoT.