A Semantic Gateway for Internet of Things Interoperability at the Application Layer

Abstract

Due to the rapid growth of the Internet of Things (IoT), researchers have demonstrated various IoT solutions, which are used to interconnect a wide range of IoT devices through the Internet. However, IoT stumbled into vertical silos; the available solutions provide specific IoT infrastructure, devices, protocols, data formats and models. This diversity and heterogeneity lead to interoperability issues. Heterogeneity happens at all IoT layers, especially at the application layer; devices often adopt mutually incompatible application-layer communication protocols to connect devices to IoT services. Furthermore, in order to integrate semantics to raw data, each system uses its one domain-specific ontology to make data more understandable and interpretable by adding semantic annotations. Working in isolation reduces the interoperability among IoT devices and systems, things across domains need to internetwork and collaborate to provide high level IoT services. Therefore, to alleviate the problem of both communication protocol interoperability and semantic interoperability across vertical silos of systems at the application layer, this paper proposes a semantic gateway (SGIoT) that acts as a bridge between heterogeneous sink nodes at the physical level and IoT services. SGIoT enables interconnectivity between communication protocols such as CoAP and MQTT regardless of their communication model, meanwhile it enables semantics integration throu gh cross-domain ontology (CDOnto) for semantic annotation, in order to provide interpretation of messages among IoT applications across domains. Our approach focuses on modularity and extensibility.