Abstract
Sensor Web and Internet of Things (IoT) (SW-IoT) have been attracting attention from various fields. Both of them deploy networks of embedded devices to monitor physical properties (i.e., sensing capability) or to be controlled (i.e., tasking capability). One of the most important tasks to realize the SW-IoT vision is to establish an open and interoperable architecture, across the device layer, gateway layer, service layer, and application layer. To achieve this objective, many organizations and alliances propose standards for different layers. Among the standards, Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) SensorThings API is arguably one of the most complete and flexible service standards. However, the SensorThings API only address heterogeneity issues in the service layer. Embedded devices following proprietary protocols need to join closed ecosystems and then link to the SensorThings API ecosystem via customized connectors. To address this issue, one could first follow another device layer and gateway layer open standards and then perform data model mapping with the SensorThings API. However, the data model mapping is not always straightforward as the standards were designed independently. Therefore, this research tries to propose a more direct solution to unify the entire SW-IoT architecture by extending the SensorThings API ecosystem to the gateway layer and the device layer. To be specific, this research proposes SW-IoT Plug and Play (IoT-PNP) to achieve an automatic registration procedure for embedded devices. The IoT-PNP contains three main components: (1) A description file describing device metadata and capabilities, (2) a communication protocol between the gateway layer and the device layer for establishing connections, and (3) an automatic registration procedure for both sensing and tasking capabilities. Overall, we believe the proposed solution could help achieve an open and interoperable SW-IoT end-to-end architecture based on the OGC SensorThings API.
Highlights
Sensor Web is a widely distributed network connecting different types of sensors [1,2]
We propose a solution called SW-Internet of Things (IoT) Plug and Play (IoT-PNP) to achieve an automatic registration procedure from embedded devices to SensorThings API services
Since this research aims at proposing a plug-and-play solution based on the SensorThings API, we can directly follow the SensorThings API data model to design the description file
Summary
Sensor Web is a widely distributed network connecting different types of sensors [1,2]. In-situ or remote sensors can continuously collect observations of instruments and environment [3]. By sharing these large number of observations online via interoperable ICT (Information and Communication Technologies), users can integrate the observations to discover phenomena that were not observable in the past [2]. Telecommunication Union (ITU) introduced a general yet comprehensive definition. The ITU defines that the IoT is “a global infrastructure for the information society, enabling advanced services by interconnecting (physical and virtual) things based on existing and evolving interoperable information and communication technologies”, and a thing is “an object of the physical world (physical things)
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