The Web of Things: Interconnecting Devices with High Usability and Performance

Abstract

In this paper, we show that Web protocols and technologies are good candidates to design the Internet of Things. This approach allows anyone to access embedded devices through a Web application, via a standard Web browser. This Web of Things requires to embed Web servers in hardware-constrained devices. We first analyze the traffics embedded Web servers have to handle. Starting from this analysis, we propose a new way to design embedded Web servers, using a dedicated TCP/IP stack and numerous cross-layer off-line pre-calculation (where information are shared between IP, TCP, HTTP and the Web application). We finally present a prototype -- named Smews -- as a proof of concept of our proposals. It has been embedded in tiny devices (smart cards, sensors and other embedded devices), with a requirement of only 200~bytes of RAM and 7~kilo-bytes of code. We show that it is significantly faster than other state of the art solutions. We made Smews source code publically available under an open-source license.