Towards a new semantic middleware for service description, discovery, selection, and composition in the Internet of Things

Abstract

AbstractThe emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) allows the integration of everyday devices such as tags, sensors, and actuators into the Internet. IoT also provides handy and automatic techniques to interoperate ad‐hoc, heterogeneous, and mobile networks and simplify data sharing among devices by abstracting their capabilities as services. Nevertheless, the large number and heterogeneity of encompassed networks/devices and the diversity of the offered resources/services make the IoT service description, discovery, selection, and composition a challenging task. To deal with these issues, we introduce, in this article, a semantic middleware for IoT applications based on service composition. Such a solution supports the semantic description of IoT resources, including services and user requests, and provides a modular, end‐to‐end, and loosely coupled request resolution process that comprises a context‐aware service discovery, a semantic service selection, and an automatic lightweight service composition. The proposal is illustrated and extensively evaluated on a restricted smart‐city scenario. Obtained results show that the proposed service discovery, selection, and composition sub‐processes improve the scalability of equivalent state‐of‐the‐art solutions by around 15, 20, and 40, respectively.