Today, the IETF Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) is being standardised. CoAP takes the internet of things to the next level: it enables the implementation of RESTful web services on embedded devices, thus enabling the construction of an easily accessible web of things. However, before tiny objects can make themselves available through embedded web services, several manual configuration steps are still needed to integrate a sensor network within an existing networking environment. In this paper, we describe a novel selforganisation solution to facilitate the deployment of constrained networks and enable the discovery, end-to-end connectivity and service usage of these newly deployed sensor nodes. By using embedded web service technology, the need of other protocols on these resource constrained devices is avoided. It allows automatic hierarchical discovery of CoAP servers, resulting in a browsable hierarchy of CoAP servers, which can be accessed both over CoAP and hypertext transfer protocol.Keywords: CoAP; self-organisation; IoT; internet of things; WoT; web of things; DNS; domain name system; proxy; embedded web services; discovery.Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Ishaq, I., Hoebeke, J., Rossey, J., De Poorter, E., Moerman, I. and Demeester, P. (2014) 'Enabling the web of things: facilitating deployment, discovery and resource access to IoT objects using embedded web services', Int. J. Web and Grid Services, Vol. 10, Nos. 2/3, pp.218-243. Ingrid Moerman received her degree in Electrical Engineering (1987) and the PhD degree (1992) from the Ghent University, where she became a part-time professor in 2000. She is a staff member of the Internet-based Communication Networks (IBCN) and services research group, where she is leading the research on mobile and wireless communication networks. Since 2006 she joined the Flemish research institute iMinds, where she is coordinating several interdisciplinary research projects. She is author or co-author of more than 600 publications in international journals or conference proceedings.Piet Demeester is Professor in the faculty of Engineering at Ghent University. He is Head of the research group 'Internet-Based Communication Networks and services' (IBCN) that is part of the Department of Information Technology of Ghent University. The group is focusing on several advanced research topics: network modelling, design and evaluation; mobile and wireless networking; high-performance multimedia processing; autonomic computing and networking; service engineering; content and search management and data analysis and machine learning. He is also leading the future internet (networks, media and service) Department of the Flemish research institute iMinds. He is Fellow of the IEEE.
220
I. Ishaq et al.This paper is a revised and expanded version of a paper entitled 'Facilitating sensor deployment, discovery and resource access using embedded web services ' presented at