A Federated Discovery Service for the Internet of Things
The Internet of Things (IoT) is an emergent paradigm characterized by a plethora of smart objects connected to the Internet and collaborating with other physical and virtual resources available in the Web. The development of IoT systems faces important challenges such as the high dynamicity of IoT environments as well as the wide distribution and heterogeneity of the available resources. In this context, discovery services play a significant role as they can allow clients (e.g. middleware platforms, end users, applications) to retrieve available resources based on search criteria such as resource type, capabilities, location, etc. Moreover, the high heterogeneity of these resources requires means of describing them in an unambiguous, machine interpretable way. To cope with these functionalities, we propose ForwarDS IoT, a federated discovery service aiming at providing resource discovery based on multiple attributes, range queries, and synchronous/asynchronous operations. ForwarDS IoT also encompasses an ontology based information model for semantically describing resources and IoT services. In this paper, we present the ForwarDS IoT architecture and its information model as well as a prototype implementation.
M4IoT@Middleware