Adapting heterogeneous devices into an IoT context-aware infrastructure

Abstract

The Internet of Things will expose services enabling developers to easily explore data generated by an enormous number of devices. These devices, such as industrial sensors and actuators, and house appliances can have different interfaces, interaction protocols, and payload data semantics. Manual, ad hoc, integration of these different devices would become infeasible. This paper presents an approach to dynamically integrate devices into an IoT context-aware infrastructure, which includes a well-defined architecture and a reflective description model. This infrastructure, named ContQuest, also offers a set of middleware services for context-aware applications, which rely on the reflective data to provide adaptation capabilities. In ContQuest, a device is considered a resource and is represented by Resource Agent. Each Resource Agent is structured following an architecture that aims to ease the integration and deployment of heterogeneous devices, including design solutions to adapt devices that can have different communication protocols. The approach is demonstrated using examples: (i) a wireless sensor network and (ii) a RFID reader.