Design and Implementation of Decoupled IoT Application Store: A Novel Prototype for Virtual Objects Sharing and Discovery

Abstract

The internet of things (IoT) has been growing towards the conception of a cyber-physical space in which physical things could be discovered, examined, activated, interlinked, and updated, for the realization of possible interactions in both virtual and physical space. The fundamental idea of IoT is the concept of a virtual object, which is regarded as the digital equivalent of a physical entity. Currently, in every IoT platform, the use of virtual objects has become a vital component. These virtual objects form building blocks of IoT applications, support the discovery of services, nurture the production of complex applications, foster the objects’ energy and power management efficiency, as well as address heterogeneity and scalability issues. Idea sharing and reusing are widesplread, and different solutions are built for this purpose to share applications or their components with similar domains to avoid duplication of efforts. In this paper, we design and implement a cloud-centric IoT application store that serves a purpose for hosting virtual objects of different IoT domains so that technology tinkerers can consume them and integrate them to build IoT applications. The proposed system is different than existing IoT marketplaces in the sense that they provide full-fledged IoT applications which include software and hardware that users can plug and play. The application store is aimed to be decoupled and can expose virtual objects of different IoT domains so that similar areas can use them with little or no modification. Moreover, it is also aimed to be modular, scalable, secure and support heterogeneity, which are considered vital attributes of IoT applications. An IoT testbed client application is developed to reuse some of the virtual objects from the proposed application store and to share specialized virtual objects to the proposed system for the use of other clients applications with similar goals. The performance and load of the platform are tested and found to be within an acceptable response time for up to 40 simultaneous users.

A Novel Approach towards Resource Auto-Registration and Discovery of Embedded Systems Based on DNS

“…For the server side, it can provide a direct and simple way for creating the resource and setting the properties and attributes. The OCF IoTivity framework can operate as middleware in different operating systems and platforms; the framework manages four essential functions including [42,43], resource discovery, data transmission, data management and device management. Resource discovery provides various discovery structures for resources and devices via remote and proximity connection.…”

A Novel Approach of IoT Services Orchestration Based on Multiple Sensor and Actuator Platforms Using Virtual Objects in Online IoT App-Store

“…However, most of these offered platforms are offline, which makes them inaccessible to a large number of online users. Recently, the work presented by our co-author [9] proposed the design and implementation of a decoupled IoT application store. The application store prototype [9] allows the online discovery and sharing of VOs.…”

“…Recently, the work presented by our co-author [9] proposed the design and implementation of a decoupled IoT application store. The application store prototype [9] allows the online discovery and sharing of VOs. Figure 1 below shows an overview of the previously proposed IoT app store [9].…”

“…The application store prototype [9] allows the online discovery and sharing of VOs. Figure 1 below shows an overview of the previously proposed IoT app store [9]. The physical objects are uploaded to the application store as VOs, and each VO has an executable file that can be accessed by another online user.…”

“…These IoT services can be composed of a set of Vos, each having the physical object at different physical locations. Overview of the architecture of the previously proposed IoT app store [9]. IoT: internet of things, VO: virtual object.…”