LTP: An Efficient Web Service Transport Protocol for Resource Constrained Devices

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are envisioned to become an integral part of the Future Internet. Together with countless other embedded appliances, such resource-constraint devices will form an Internet of Things (IoT) where all kinds of devices extend the Internet to the physical world. In this vision, the seamless and flexible integration of IoT devices ranging from simple sensor nodes to large scale Enterprise IT servers are the basis for novel applications and business processes not possible before. A major challenge is to master the arising challenges of scale, low resources, and heterogeneity. In the Internet and especially in Enterprise IT, heterogeneity is addressed using Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA). However, today's technologies used to realize SOAs are to heavyweight to be used in resource-constraint networks (RCNs). In this paper, we introduce a novel, versatile, and light-weight Web Service transport protocol (called Lean Transport Protocol, LTP) that allows the transparent exchange of Web Service messages between all kinds of resource-constrained devices and server or PC class systems. We describe LTP in detail and show by real-world measurements that LTP has the potential to serve as standard Web Service transport protocol in the Internet of Things.