Towards a Discovery Model for the Web of Things

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is composed of many heterogeneous pieces. The Web of Things (WoT) was created to establish a common device definition language, the Thing Description (TD), that would allow developers to set an interaction mechanism without understanding the different device implementations. Besides a definition language, a WoT ecosystem must be characterized by a robust discovery system in which the other Thing Descriptions of the devices can be easily located, registered and consulted. According to these two pillars (description and discovering), this article presents a Discovery Service model for the WoT, capable of working proactively, searching for IoT devices compatible with the Thing Description, and passively being able to register, query or list different devices when the client chooses. Furthermore, Digital Dice is used in the proposal, a software abstraction of IoT devices for managing devices, adding some features and taking advantage of microservices architectures. Finally, in the recent updates and modifications over the WoT recommendations, one of the main problems researchers may face is that there are few public domain implementations. This article also presents a fully interactive solution using the Discovery Service and Digital Dice to address this problem.