Toward a Standard Time Series Representation for IoT based on CBOR Templates

Abstract

Nowadays, we are facing an era where the Internet of Things (IoT) is growing intensively and IoT devices are being deployed massively. At this point, interoperability with the information system is a major issue for the accelerated device deployment. Most of the time, IoT information is presented as Time Series (TS). However, no standardized representation format has emerged, while the majority of the studies in the literature focus on the compression, processing, or prediction of TS. In this paper, we propose a versatile format for TS representation based on the Concise Binary Object Representation (CBOR). This representation exploits CBOR to be compact thanks to the introduction of deltas to represent measurements, tags to represent variables, and templates to transform our TS representation into the data format required by information systems. Our preliminary results show that the data collected by IoT devices can be regrouped compactly. Indeed, for the cases evaluated we have proven that the total amount of data to be sent can be reduced between 76% and 96% when compared against JavaScript Object Notation (JSON). Finally, by lowering the amount of data transmitted while keeping the same amount of information delivered, our approach has the potential to extend the battery life of IoT devices and their useful life.