Automating Heterogeneous IoT Device Networks from Multiple Brokers with Multiple Data Models

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is becoming pervasive and at each new installation of IoT platform legacy internal and external brokers have to be integrated. Internal brokers are those under control of the platform, while external brokers are managed by third parties. Both brokers kind may be multiservice/multi-tenant, and may manage multiple Data Models. The interoperable management of these complex network has to pass from the IoT device registration which is typically a recurrent operation since the IoT networks are in continuous evolution. In this paper, the above-mentioned problems have been addressed by the introduction of our concept of IoT Directory and reasoning tools to (i) manage Internal and External brokers, (ii) perform the automated registration by harvesting and reasoning of devices managed into external brokers single- or multi-tenant services, (iii) perform the automated registration and management of Data Models, and any custom Data Model. The solution has been developed and tested into Snap4City, an 100% open source IoT platform for Smart Cities and Industry 4.0, official FIWARE platform, EOSC, and lib of Node-RED. The specific IoT Directory has been developed in the context of Herit-Data Project, the results have been validated in wide condition of the whole Snap4City network of more than 18 tenant, and billions of data.