WoT Micro Servient: Bringing the W3C Web of Things to Resource Constrained Edge Devices

Abstract

The chaotic growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) determined a fragmented landscape with a huge number of devices, technologies and platforms available on the market, and consequential issues of interoperability on many system deployments. The recent W3C Web of Things (WoT) standards aimed to ease the deployment of heterogeneous systems by introducing uniform and well-defined software interfaces among the systems’ components. Although the WoT reference architecture is generic and agnostic to the target devices, its widespread adoption depends on the availability of specific tools named Servients, which enable the run-time operations of WoT applications. In this paper we aim at contributing to the adoption of the W3C WoT standards by presenting WoT Micro-Servient (WMS), a framework for bringing the WoT paradigm to the extreme edge of an IoT environment. Through WMS, developers can design, compile and install WoT applications on micro-controllers and embedded systems with constrained hardware capabilities. We describe the architecture and functionalities of the tool, and demonstrate its effectiveness in terms of reduced latency and energy consumption compared to the state-of-art proxy-based solution enabled by Node-wot, i.e. the official implementation of W3C WoT. Finally, we discuss a real-world application related to smart home, where WMS is used to enable a WoT-based remote monitoring and control of indoor plants, by enabling seamless integration between micro-controllers and mobile devices.