Device collaboration framework in IoT-aggregator for realizing smart environment

Abstract

Device collaboration framework helps diversified interconnected devices to work together to form a smart environment. To realize such device collaboration in practical scenarios, API standardization is necessary to assure interoperability of products from different manufacturers. However, such standardization efforts face limitation and tend to be difficult in the IoT, where target devices are not restricted to specific types of devices, and where manufacturers are strongly motivated to go beyond standards by adding new functions to make their products more attractive than competitors' products. Based on this observation, we have come up with a framework to translate standard API requests to device-specific API requests that devices natively understand. We use so-called device profile, a machine-readable description of device API for translation. Device profile consists of two distinct parts: general device profile (GP) and device specific profile (SP), each of which defines the standard set of API for device class and API conversion rules needed for translation, respectively. Manufacturers can register the profiles of their products in a central repository to publish their new standard set of APIs as GP, and let their products conform to other standards by adding SP. As multiple GPs can be bound to devices, they can support APIs of multiple standards at the same time, regardless of providing only one set of API natively in devices. We have implemented our framework and thoroughly evaluated it with respect to performance, usability, expressiveness, security and scalability. Our evaluation shows that our framework works effectively for realizing device collaboration in practical usage.