IoTexpert: Interconnection, Interoperability and Integration of IoT Platforms

The Internet of Things (IoT) helps make any system smart. Objects connected to the internet are becoming an integral part of our life. Solutions of IoT are being utilized in various areas, for example, agriculture, businesses, medicine and urban communities. To address different devices from these different domains, the platforms are split and vertically oriented. Any individual who has a desire in accessing those platforms and the data in those platforms should manually adapt to the API that is specific to the platform and models of data in the platform. Today's platforms fail to establish a dynamic ecosphere. That is, no broadly accepted IoT platform is available today. This is partly because of the heterogeneity of IoT platforms. As a result, if developers want to access various things or data belonging to other platforms, they have to access them physically using certain adapters specific to the platforms. These problems summarize to one major issue: missing interoperability in IoT platforms. This paper aims at bridging the gap in the interconnection of IoT platforms and building an IoT ecosystem by creating an API for cross-platform, cross-standard and cross-domain IoT services. IoTexpert is like a middleware that would act as an important factor in creating an IoT ecosystem as it is in charge for a large portion of the intelligence of IoT because it integrates data from the devices and allows communication between them. The paper proposes an architecture model for IoTexpert based on the requirements of IoT platforms, elaborating on the approach used to handle the proposed modules. Furthermore, comparisons are made with other IoT platforms and the results show that IoTexpert is critical to overcome the issues with the performance, cost and response time in today's IoT platforms.