Internet of Things

4Discoverability

The IoT is envisioned to bring together billions of devices, or “smart objects”, by connecting them in an Internet‐like structure, allowing them to communicate and exchange information and to enable new forms of interaction among things and people. Smart objects are typically equipped with a microcontroller, a radio interface for communication, sensors and/or actuators. Smart objects are constrained devices, with limited capabilities in terms of computational power and memory. They are typically battery‐powered, thus introducing even more constraints on energy consumption: this motivates the quest for energy‐efficient technologies, communication/networking protocols, and mechanisms. Internet Protocol (IP) has been widely envisaged as the true IoT enabler, as it allows full interoperability among heterogeneous objects. As part of the standardization process that is taking place, new low‐power protocols are being defined in international organizations, such as the IETF and the IEEE.

4.1 Service and Resource Discovery

Together with application‐layer protocols, suitable mechanisms for service and resource discovery should be defined. In particular, CoAP defines the term service discovery as the procedure used by a client to learn about the endpoints exposed by a server. A service is discovered by a client by learning the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) [28] that references a resource in the server namespace. Resource discovery is related to the discovery of the ...