A Cloud-Based and Dynamic DNS Approach to Enable the Web of Things

Abstract

Thanks to the evolution in the hardware and software fields, the Internet usage scope is continuously covering smaller and resource-constrained devices. Such devices, commonly called Internet of Things (IoT) devices, with sensing/actuation capabilities, are becoming capable of managing the complexity of communications over the Internet. Nevertheless, the IoT ecosystem is still fragmented due to the different used vertical solutions. This heterogeneity makes IoT devices/systems unable to communicate seamlessly, leading to limited cooperation and tightly coupled deployments. To deal with the interoperability issues in IoT, we propose, in this paper, a Cloud-based approach with a Dynamic Domain Name System (DDNS) mechanism enabling the IoT devices to communicate using the Representational state transfer (REST) model: an approach that follows the Web of things (WoT) paradigm. In particular, the system makes the IoT devices’ hosted resources (e.g., sensors and actuators) able to be steered using globally resolvable (over the Internet) Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) even when deployed behind Network Address Translators (NATs) and firewalls. The system we conceived requires only one public registered domain name to associate, for all the distributed IoT devices, sub-domains of the public one while using a clever routing mechanism. An online implementation of the testbed is provided to show the feasibility of the approach. Further, a performance evaluation of the system is reported to assess the resource usage of the solution.