Aχon: IoT Attribute-based dynamic connector For Emergency Applications

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm-based applications are becoming essential in our daily lives in smart houses, medical equipment, agriculture, industries, smart cities, and other fields. While building an IoT system, architects and developers use distributed architectures where the system is a set of interoperated components by connectors. Different limitations incur the development of a connector in IoT devices, i.e., connectivity and internal resources. The reason is that each service needs an exclusive allocation of the device’s storage, memory, and processing power which makes running multiple services on the same device cumbersome. In this research, we design a generic "Software Connector" that aims to optimize the use of the device’s resources. The proposed connector will dynamically allocate and deallocate necessary resources at runtime when receiving a message, and it will adapt its behavior based on a set of attributes obtained from the local database and the incoming messages. The connector improves messages’ reliability by following the broadcast-default function, especially in case of network failure. We applied the proposed approach to an "Emergency Response System" with different IoT device types, describing an emergency scenario to validate the proposed approach. More ever, to make the proposed connector more accessible for developers to extend its functionalities and increase the number of supported platforms, we will commit it to an online repository.