Scalable Directory Service for IoT Applications

Abstract

Unprecedentedly, a massive number of devices are getting connected to the network in the new era of the Internet of Things. For the discovery, authentication,, secure access and management of these Internet of Things devices, an Internet of Things directory service is needed. Its responsibility would be to store and provide the attributes of Internet of Things devices, such as identifier, location, owner's name, generated data types, and security parameters. In this article, we present the architectural design of an Internet of Things directory service that is capable of storing a huge number of records and providing functions for their fast lookup (latency of a few milliseconds) and dynamic update (latency of a few seconds), while fully complying with owner-centric security and privacy policies. To demonstrate its feasibility and overall quality, we also discuss the experimental results obtained from a proof-of-concept implementation of the record database and related communication interfaces.