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

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.