Bridging IoT Protocols with the Web of Things: A Path to Enhanced Interoperability

Abstract

Nowadays, the Internet of Things (IoT) is reshaping numerous application domains. Amidst the different communication protocols currently available (MQTT, CoAP, AMQP, DPWS, etc.) and the abundance of management platforms, the IoT domain has stumbled into vertical silos of proprietary systems hindering interoperability. Within this intricate and fragmented ecosystem, the need for an intelligent and scalable architecture promoting interoperability becomes imperative to maximize the potential of IoT. This paper introduces a system designed to enhance the convergence of IoT protocols (e.g., MQTT, CoAP, AMQP, etc.) with the Web of Things (WoT) paradigm. Our proposed gateway-based solution integrates two systems: Stack4Things (S4T) and Data eXchange Mediator Synthesizer (DeXMS). The role of the latter is to adapt, at the gateway level, the IoT protocols and expose the resources/functionalities of the IoT devices as RESTful APIs using HTTP. Meanwhile, the former (i.e., S4T), leveraging its Dynamic DNS system, ensures that these RESTful resources (exposed at the gateway) are accessible over the Web using publicly routable Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) even when the gateway is deployed behind networking middle boxes (e.g., NATs and firewalls).