Thing as a Service Interoperability: Review and Framework Proposal

Internet of things (IoT) is global network of interconnected entities aimed at automating our lives. However, a number of IoT devices and systems have been created in parallel and there is no universal coding language and communication protocol. For this reason, IoT interoperability is a complex research and practical problem. In this work, we review existing work about IoT interoperability and IoT ontologies. Next, we propose a framework for things as a service interoperability that includes composition of different sensors and actuators at service level, and their integration with existing cloud services. The proposed framework consists of four main layers: virtual sensor, service, semantic, and interoperability layer. We plan to use the proposed framework to achieve service-level interoperability of smart things that will be semantically annotated in order to describe their functional and non-functional properties (with special emphasis on security and privacy).