Service Oriented Middleware for the Internet of Things: A Perspective

Abstract

Abstract. The Internet of Things plays a central role in the foreseen shift of the Internet to the Future Internet, as it incarnates the drastic expansion of the Internet network with non-classical ICT devices. It will further be a major source of evolution of usage, due to the penetration in the user's life. As such, we envision that the Internet of Things will cooperate with the Internet of Services to provide users with services that are aware of their surrounding environment. The supporting service-oriented middleware shall then abstract the functionalities of Things as services as well as provide the needed interoperability and flexibility, through a loose coupling of components and composition of services. Still, core functionalities of the middleware, namely service discovery and composition, need to be revisited to meet the challenges posed by the Internet of Things. Challenges in particular relate to the ultra large scale, heterogeneity and dynamics of the Internet of Things that are far beyond the ones of today's Internet of Services. In addition, new challenges also arise, pertaining to the physical-world aspect that is central to the IoT. In this paper, we survey the major challenges posed to service-oriented middleware towards sustaining a service-based Internet of Things, together with related state of the art. We then concentrate on the specific solutions that we are investigating within the INRIA ARLES project team as part of the CHOReOS European project, discussing new approaches to overcome the challenges particular to the Internet of Things.

Conception and Evaluation of Internet of Things Connecting to RFID Framework

“…These activities include planning and forecasting, control and storage, handling, order processing and distribution, marketing, purchasing, packaging, aftersales service [9]. All these activities result in product related information flows and financial flows, the optimization of which is a key factor for the competitiveness of companies.…”

Aspect Oriented Middleware for Internet of Things: A State-of-the Art Survey of Service Discovery Approaches

“…The proposed middleware is incorporated with the service that performs functional substitution thereby avoiding manual intervention in certain situation, for example in the event of computing the wind-chill factor at a certain location where the wind-chill sensors or actuators are not available for providing data about the needed location. Then the system is expected to compute the desired information through the composition of the temperature and wind speed readings using conventional wind chill equation, as the literature reveals that the function of a wind-chill sensor is equivalent to the function provided by the thermometer [58]. The middleware is augmented with the services that uses the required estimations in the event of non-availability of data and distributes monitoring feature to avoid possible missing of data.…”

“…Thiago et al [58] suggest five layered architecture for the IoT. Those layers include Edge Technology layer which consists of RFID tags, sensors, actuators and hardware devices constituting things in the IoT paradigm, Access Gateway Layer dealing with publishing, subscribing services provided by the things, message routing and communication, Internet layer for connecting source and destination, Middleware layer including functionalities like services discovery, service selection and security, and application layer to deliver the services.…”

Ontologies for the internet of things

“…Since we take a service-oriented approach, in this discussion we use the word "service" to refer to the various incarnations of things, such as sensors, actuators, etc.. A result is, then, obtained by executing this composition within the existing network. As introduced in [1], the novelty in our approach lies in the following characteristics of the system: Approximate Composition: Composition is the process through which a dataflow graph is constructed, connecting available IoT services, in order to produce some desired result. Normally, service composition approaches aim to find the dataflow graph that is optimal in some metric.…”

“…In light of the challenges above, we propose a new middleware for the Internet of Things [1]. Our solution, as outlined in Section 2, is based on the service-oriented paradigm that abstracts things as services, therefore allowing us to keep services loosely coupled in order to increase reusability.…”