A Novel Service-Oriented Platform for the Internet of Things

Abstract

As Internet of Things (IoT) has received substantial attention in industry and academia recently, many IoT devices and IoT platforms have been proposed and being developed. In this paper we propose a novel IoT platform, called SoPIoT that is different from existent IoT platforms in several aspects. Since a device is abstracted with a set of services it provides, any computing resources can be easily integrated to the platform. In addition to the general use case of IoT where the smart devices provide useful services cooperatively and autonomously without the intervention of the user, SoPIoT allows a user to define a composite service dynamically at run-time by a script language program. To SoPIoT, the IoT system looks like a distributed system that consists of many computing resources, running multiple applications currently where an application corresponds to a composite service. The central middleware maps and schedules the services to the computing resources. The scalability of SoPIoT is achieved by forming the hierarchy of middlewares. The viability of the proposed IoT platform is confirmed by building a smart office test-bed. Experimental results show that a central middleware can support more than 1,000 devices.