A generic Internet of things (IoT) platform supporting plug-and-play device management based on the semantic web

Abstract

There is a large variety of Internet of things (IoT) devices and their peripherals available in consumer markets, and IoT deployers should work on customizing device drivers that are compatible with their peripherals. Implementing compatible device drivers, however, often requires a burden of work. This paper proposes a generic platform that enables plug-and-play (PnP) integration for sensors and actuators to allow the addition and removal of IoT device peripherals without re-customizing all the device drivers. To this end, we employ IoT ontologies and semantics to represent IoT device characteristics and to infer IoT device behaviors. IoT device behavior is then passed to the generic device driver to cover device-specific operation. Since the generic device driver selectively operates most of the available function calls required in IoT devices, most of the programming work that is normally required for device customization is removed, and management overhead for software installation and maintenance can be minimized. To this end, we employ IoT ontologies and semantics as well as generic programming techniques in the generic platform in order to configure and control IoT devices. In the proposed platform, IoT device characteristics, including I/O functions and configuration rules, are defined using custom-built IoT ontologies, and operational behaviors are inferred through SPARQL queries. The generic platform then passes function-call name and configuration rules corresponding to the newly added peripheral device’s specification. The experimental results show that our generic platform covers most of the popular sensors available in the market. Our solution therefore enables a true PnP experience of sensors and actuator peripherals in IoT devices. © 2019, The Author(s).