WoT Store: Managing resources and applications on the web of things

Abstract

The chaotic growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) determined a fragmented landscape with a huge number of devices, technologies and platforms available on the market, and the consequential issues of interoperability on many system deployments. The Web of Things (WoT) architecture recently proposed by the W3C consortium constitutes a novel solution to enable interoperability across IoT platforms and application domains. At the same time, in order to see an effective improvement, a wide adoption of the W3C WoT solutions from the academic and industrial communities is required; this translates into the need of well-defined and complete support tools easing the deployment of W3C WoT applications. In this paper, we meet such requirement by proposing the WoT Store, a novel platform for managing and easing the deployment of Things and applications on the W3C WoT. The WoT Store allows the dynamic discovery of the resources available in the environment, i.e. the Things, and to interact with each of them through a dashboard, by visualizing their properties, executing commands or observing the notifications produced. In addition, similar to popular app stores, the WoT Store allows the search and execution of third-party WoT applications that interact with the available Things again in a seamless way. We validate the operations of our framework with two evaluation studies. First, through a small-case testbed, we demonstrate the Thing discovery and the possibility to run WoT applications that orchestrate the operations of multiple, heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Second, through a mixed real/simulated large-scale crowdsensing scenario, we demonstrate the scalability of the platform, and the possibility to aggregate and visualize the data-streams produced by the WoT applications with minimal efforts for the users.