An IoT gateway centric architecture to provide novel M2M services

TLDR

This paper proposes an innovative IoT architecture that enables real‑time interaction between mobile clients and both smart and legacy sensors and actuators via a wireless gateway. The architecture employs a RESTful gateway on Google App Engine that allows mobile clients to dynamically discover M2M devices, manage connections to non‑smart devices over Modbus, associate sensor and actuator data with SenML metadata, and extend SenML to support actuator control. The authors illustrate the architecture in two real‑life scenarios and summarize its contributions and future research directions.

Abstract

This paper proposes an innovative Internet of Things (IoT) architecture that allows real time interaction between mobile clients and smart/legacy things (sensors and actuators) via a wireless gateway. The novel services provided are: (i) dynamic discovery of M2M device and endpoints by the clients, (ii) managing connection with non-smart things connected over modbus, (iii) associate metadata to sensor and actuator measurements using Sensor Markup Language (SenML) representation and (iv) extending the current capabilities of SenML to support actuator control from mobile clients. These clients are equipped with an end-user application that initiates the discovery phase to learn about the devices and endpoints (sensors and actuators) connected to the wireless gateway. Then the user can select desired sensors to receive and display sensor metadata and control actuators from the mobile device. Prototypes of the mobile application and the wireless gateway have been implemented to validate the entire architecture. The gateway is implemented using RESTful web services and currently runs in a Google App Engine. Two real life scenarios are discussed that can be implemented using the architecture. Finally overall contributions and future research scopes are summarized.