Ubiquitous RFID tags, sensors, actuators, mobile phones etc. cut across many areas of modern-day living, which offers the ability to measure, infer and understand the environmental indicators. The proliferation of these devices creates the term “Internet of Things” (IoT), wherein these devices blend seamlessly with the environment around us, and the information is shared across the whole platform. The notion “Internet of Things” dates back to 1999 when first proposed by Kevin Ashton. Even though logistic is the originally considered application, in the past decade, the coverage of Internet of Things has been extended to a wide range of applications including healthcare, utilities, transport etc. Due to its high impact on several aspects of everyday life and behavior of the potential users, Internet of Things is listed as one of the six “disruptive civil technologies” by the US National Intelligence Council.
Considering the massive number of devices and various application scenarios in Internet of Things, the devices within Internet of Things are highly heterogeneous. From the perspective of communication, one of the significant heterogeneity is the bandwidth heterogeneity and thus the corresponding radio-frequency front end. To address the bandwidth heterogeneity, various communication standards such as ZigBee, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi are adopted simultaneously in the current Internet of Things platform, which leads to a wild growth of co-located wireless communication standards. When multiple wireless communication standards are operated in the same geographical environment, the devices often suffer from harmful interference. Furthermore, the communication between devices with different communication standards is only possible by gateway nodes, resulting in the fragmentation of the whole network, hampering the objects interoperability and slowing down the development of a unified reference model for Internet of Things.
To enable the connectivity between devices with various bandwidths, some existing works build middlewares to hide the technical details of different communication standards from the application layer. Service Oriented Device Architecture (SODA) is proposed as a promising approach to integrate Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) principles into the Internet of Things. An effective SOA-based integration of Internet of Things is illustrated in enterprise service. Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) has been widely used as the process language in the middleware. However, these technologies used to realize middleware architectures are often not suitable for resource-constrained scenario due to their complexity.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds