A novel IoT-device management platform for on-the-fly generation of user interface via manifest-file addressing heterogeneity.

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is becoming indispensable across various application domains. In the domain of the consumer IoT, many original device manufacturers are coming up with a wide variety of IoT-based products and services catering with a range of applications such as personal-fitness training devices, healthcare devices, to smart-home things, etc. There is an accompanying smartphone application, called the IoT control app (ICA) through which such IoT devices are controlled. As of now, a user shall install a separate ICA app for each and every IoT device they own. This is because of the diverse heterogeneity inherent in the IoT domain. The installation of multiple ICAs leads to: memory congestion, steeper battery discharging and increased vulnerability-in smartphones. The diversity in IoT devices can be systematically abstracted away with text written in a manifest file. Based on this manifest file, a user-interface for the IoT-device gets generated on the fly by the ICA. In this article, we propose a manifest-based IoT-device platform including an application-layer protocol, which makes it possible for a single ICA App to control any compliant IoT-device after appropriate authentication. We developed a manifest-grammar for specifying error-free manifest files for different IoT-devices towards a seamless integration between ICA and IoT-devices.