A metaprotocol-based Internet of Things architecture

In this paper we propose a metaprotocol-based architecture for the Internet of Things. The metaprotocol defines the message content, but it uses existing communication protocols and the forwarding capabilities of nodes that support this metaprotocol. Such nodes are described with a model that is demonstrated with a prototype middleware implementation. The behaviour of non-trivial nodes is defined with rules that specify actions for various events, including forwarding of received messages. In this way, a dynamic overlay network can be created with various possibilities of interconnecting and various node roles. Regardless of the roles a node possesses, communication with other nodes in this architecture is based on the same metaprotocol. The metaprotocol is based on SQL operations, which allows maximum flexibility in the design of a specific system. On the other hand, the proposed message encoding and the dependence on the underlying transmission protocols allow the creation of very short and simple messages, so that even the most resource-constrained devices can be included in such a system. A comparison with similar architectures shows the expected advantages of the proposed architecture when most resource-constrained nodes are used and when an arbitrary network configuration is required, different from the standard layered thing-gateway-server configuration.

Abstract licence: CC BY-NC

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