Towards behaviour-aware compositions of things in the future internet

Abstract

Nowadays Internet is evolving into the vision of the Internet of Things where everyday life objects, devices or things are identifiable, readable, recognizable, addressable, and even controllable via the Internet. Future service-oriented Internet things will offer their functionality via service-enabled interfaces. The new emergent OASIS standard DPWS has been designed as a set of guidelines based on WS-* specifications to provide interoperability among heterogeneous things in a networked environment. But there is still a need to represent explicitly the (implicit) behaviour of things in order to develop applications in a more rigorous way. In this paper, we promote the usage of WS-* specifications to specify service interfaces of things by adding a set of constraints to the guidelines exposed by DPWS to represent the behaviour of single and composite things by reducing inconsistency problems, such as deadlock situations. We also point out some brushstrokes of our future work, first proposing verification techniques to check if a composition of things fulfills or violates the behaviour of the things, second leading to a platform to support the development of behaviour-aware compositions of things, and third extending the approach to consider important aspects in compositions such as semantic, context and social information.