A Unified Solution for IoT Device Management

Abstract

Sensing and actuating tasks in the Internet of Things (IoT) increasingly involve a variety of sensors, comprising not only physical, electronic-based devices, but also virtual sensors (i.e., software agents that abstract one or more physical sensors), and even human sensors, such as, humanoriginated data collected from social networks. In this context, the main objective of this paper is to propose and present a unified IoT device management solution based on the LightWeight Machine-to-Machine (LwM2M) protocol that deals with the heterogeneity of sensing and actuating mechanisms in IoT. We start by presenting the underlying concepts and then proceed to present the proposed unified management model. Subsequently, proof-of-concept implementations of the proposed model using physical sensors, virtual sensors, and human sensors are presented. The outcome of these implementations, which use off-the-shelf technology, shows that the proposed management approach is feasible and leads to a unified view of all types of sensing.