Efficient naming, addressing and profile services in Internet-of-Things sensory environments

Abstract

We present a naming, addressing, and profile server (NAPS) as a middleware to bridge different platforms in Internet-of-Things (IoT) sensory environments. Given massive amount of heterogeneous devices deployed across different platforms, NAPS serves as the key module at the back-end data center to aid the efficient upstream sensory data collection, content-based data filtering and matching, and downstream efficient control by applications. While previous research efforts only focus on a specific standard or protocol, we aim to design a middleware component servicing dynamic application needs, and sensors/actuators deployment and configurations across different platforms. Specifically, we propose a complete design of NAPS, including its key functionalities, system flows, interfaces, and individual module design. We further propose a unique device naming and addressing convention, and show its applicability to a few widely-used standards and protocols. We also propose an efficient identifier generation scheme; and we demonstrate a full implementation of the above designs with a case study, including a service registration portal. Finally, performance evaluation is done against the system throughput. © 2013 Elsevier B.V.