A Publish/Subscribe Protocol for Event-Driven Communications in the Internet of Things

Internet of Things is a futuristic vision of networked objects able to take smart decisions and to assist humans in their daily activities. The founding factor of such a vision is the capacity of objects to exchange data by means of wireless networks, and the applied communication pattern is event-driven and multicast. Publish/subscribe services are a promising communication technology for building solutions according to the Internet of Things' vision. The available solutions consist in the adaptation of widely-known products for publish/subscribe services taken from other contexts and application domains, without considering the key peculiarities of the Internet of Things. Our driving idea is to consider beaconing as the basic communication means, and to build a publish/subscribe service based on it. Our solution can be used stand-alone for event-driven communications and/or integrated within standardized protocols to provide basic communication capabilities. We present a preliminary set of experiments showing the efficiency of our solution.