LoWPANs Meet Service-Oriented Architecture

Abstract

The Low-Power Wireless Personal Area Networks (LoWPANs) have been recognized as a promising technology for ubiquitous and pervasive computing systems. However, LoWPAN technology is still open to being adapted to existing interoperability mechanisms defined for the Internet. Service-Oriented-Architecture (SOA) is one of the key paradigms that enables the deployment of services at large-scale over the Internet domain and its integration with LoWPANs has opened new pathways for novel applications and research. Despite the need to integrate SOA with LoWPANs, only a handful efforts are underway to achieve the goal. In this paper, we discuss the integration of LoWPANs with ServiceOriented-Architecture (SOA) for seamless provisioning of services in LoWPANs, especially considering the future of LoWPANs, i.e., IPv6-enabled LoWPANs (6LoWPANs). We first present an overview about the general concepts of SOA and its applicability onto low-power devices. Then, we discuss 6LoWPAN, a milestone protocol that bridged the gap between low-power devices and the IP world and discuss the advantages, challenges and opportunities for porting SOA over LoWPANs. We also present the main research efforts that contributed to featuring the integration LoWPANs with SOA and we draw a research roadmap on potential research directions and challenges for achieving an efficient coupling among LoWPANs and SOA.