Resource discovery in Internet of Things: Current trends and future standardization aspects

To realize the vision of Internet of Things, there must be mechanisms to discover resources and their capabilities. Thus resource discovery becomes a fundamental requirement of any IoT platform. This paper provides a comprehensive categorization of the current technology landscape for discovery while pointing out their advantages and limitations. Then, a novel search engine based resource discovery framework is proposed. The framework comprises of a proxy layer which includes drivers for various communication technologies and protocols. There is a central registry to store the configurations of the resources and index them based on the configuration parameters. A “lifetime” attribute is introduced which denotes the period through which a resource is discoverable. The search engine ranks the resulting resources of a discovery request and returns an URI to directly access each resource. The functionalities of the proposed framework are exposed using RESTful web services. The framework allows discovery of both smart and legacy devices. We have performed gap analysis of current IoT standards for discovery mechanisms and provide suggestions to improve them to maintain interoperability. The outcomes are communicated to Standard Development Organizations like W3C (in Web of Things Interest Group) and oneM2M.