Interacting with the SOA-Based Internet of Things: Discovery, Query, Selection, and On-Demand Provisioning of Web Services

TLDR

The rise of smart embedded devices blurs the virtual–real boundary, creating opportunities for highly dynamic, diverse, and efficient enterprise services, but also posing challenges for discovering and provisioning services in large, resource‑limited networks. The paper proposes a process and system architecture that allows developers and business designers to dynamically query, select, and use or deploy real‑world services on embedded devices within composite applications. The mechanism is a process and architecture that supports dynamic discovery, selection, and on‑demand provisioning of services running on physical devices.

Abstract

The increasing usage of smart embedded devices in business blurs the line between the virtual and real worlds. This creates new opportunities to build applications that better integrate real-time state of the physical world, and hence, provides enterprise services that are highly dynamic, more diverse, and efficient. Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) approaches traditionally used to couple functionality of heavyweight corporate IT systems, are becoming applicable to embedded real-world devices, i.e., objects of the physical world that feature embedded processing and communication. In such infrastructures, composed of large numbers of networked, resource-limited devices, the discovery of services and on-demand provisioning of missing functionality is a significant challenge. We propose a process and a suitable system architecture that enables developers and business process designers to dynamically query, select, and use running instances of real-world services (i.e., services running on physical devices) or even deploy new ones on-demand, all in the context of composite, real-world business applications.