An Internet of Things (IoT) architecture for embedded appliances

Abstract

Although much of the work has been done until today to realize the Internet of Things (IoT) into practice, most of the work focuses on resource-constrained nodes, rather than linking the existing embedded systems to the IoT network. In this paper, we propose the uID-CoAP architecture, a new architecture designed to host IoT services on common embedded systems, like usual consumer appliances. As they often need to provide a number of sophisticated functions compared to simple sensor nodes, we combine the constrained application protocol (CoAP) with the ubiquitous ID (uID) architecture. The latter plays a crucial role for keeping the knowledge and data required for practical complex IoT services. In addition, we provide a software framework for embedded appliance nodes, designed to reduce the burden of embedded appliance manufacturers by providing an intuitive, consistent, and easy-to-use APL Based on this idea, our framework provides functions to build RESTful services in addition to the low-level communication API. We have evaluated our system through a case-study, and showed that our framework can be used effectively to implement practical IoT applications over existing embedded systems with a small programming effort.