Global-scale Federated Access to Smart Objects Using XMPP

Communication with smart objects currently only works in isolated, sometimes even proprietary islands. This lack of interoperability limits the value of smart objects connected to the Internet of Things (IoT). We propose to use the eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) to connect IoT islands. XMPP is inherently federated, secure, globally scalable and designed for collaboration. We use XMPP Multi-User Chat (MUC) to build a secure and accessible platform for sensor data exchange between organizations. We demonstrate a scenario of three distributed and interconnected XMPP-driven sites, whereas different client types access sensor data from all sites. Our evaluation results confirm that the architectural pattern presented in this work can easily be used in any XMPP-based system without the need to enhance or to extend the standards.