Protocol and Architecture to Bring Things into Internet of Things

摘要

The Internet of Things (IoT) concept proposes that everyday objects are globally accessible from the Internet and integrate into new services having a remarkable impact on our society. Opposite to Internet world,thingsusually belong to resource-challenged environments where energy, data throughput, and computing resources are scarce. Building upon existing standards in the field such as IEEE1451 and ZigBee and rooted in context semantics, this paper proposes CTP (Communication Things Protocol) as a protocol specification to allow interoperability amongthingswith different communication standards as well as simplicity and functionality to build IoT systems. Also, this paper proposes the use of the IoT gateway as a fundamental component in IoT architectures to provide seamless connectivity and interoperability amongthingsand connect two different worlds to build the IoT: theThings worldand theInternet world. Both CTP and IoT gateway constitute a middleware content-centric architecture presented as the mechanism to achieve a balance between the intrinsic limitations ofthingsin the physical world and what is required from them in the virtual world. Said middleware content-centric architecture is implemented within the frame of two European projects targeting smart environments and proving said CTP’s objectives in real scenarios.