Modeling and Simulating the Web of Things from an Information Retrieval Perspective

Abstract

Internet and Web technologies have changed our lives in ways we are not yet fully aware of. In the near future, Internet will interconnect more than 50 billion things in the real world, nodes will sense billions of features and properties of interest, and things will be represented by web-based, bi-directional services with highly dynamic content and real-time data. This is the new era of the Internet and the Web of Things . Since the emergence of such paradigms implies the evolution and integration of the systems with which they interact, it is essential to develop abstract models for representing and simulating the Web of Things in order to establish new approaches. This article describes a Web of Things model based on a structured XML representation. We also present a simulator whose ultimate goal is to encapsulate the expected dynamics of the Web of Things for the future development of information retrieval (IR) systems. The simulator generates a real-time collection of XML documents containing spatio-temporal contexts and textual and sensed information of highly dynamic dimensions. The simulator is characterized by its flexibility and versatility for representing real-world scenarios and offers a unique perspective for information retrieval. In this article, we evaluate and test the simulator in terms of its performance variables for computing resource consumption and present our experimentation with the simulator on three real scenarios by considering the generation variables for the IR document collection.