A Middleware Framework for the Internet of Things

After the traditional Internet (with program-tohuman communication), and after the Internet of Services (with program-to-program communication), the Internet of Things is a new paradigm of communication aiming at integrating the state of everyday things into the digital world. But things are everywhere, have different colours, come in different flavours, so, building reliable applications that depend on such things imposes great challenges and demand for new approaches to integrate heterogeneous devices smoothly. These new methods should use public and resilient networks, like the Internet, to secure and facilitate the access to things. This paper addresses such constraints and proposes a middleware framework to interact with the devices and their data, all this supported by the use of Web services. It is our goal to design and implement a generic framework where services represent functionalities of sensor networks and provide a dynamic way for high-level applications to interact and program such devices with heterogeneous hardware. By using Web services we benefit from the interoperable technology, cross platform, independency of programming languages, and available on the Web. Those attributes are ideal to combine heterogeneous systems like sensor networks. It is also our goal to create an event-driven system, where the user can subscribe the available services and receive notifications as network data is being processed.