RESTful Sensor Web Enablement Services for Wireless Sensor Networks

Due to the large number of sensor manufacturers and differing accompanying protocols, integrating diverse sensors into observation systems is not straightforward. A coherent infrastructure is needed to treat sensors in an interoperable, platform-independent and uniform way. The concept of the Sensor Web reflects such a kind of infrastructure for automatically discovering and accessing appropriate information from heterogeneous sensor devices over the Internet. In this context, the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) established the Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) initiative that specifies standard interfaces and encodings to remotely access, encode and exchange the sensed data. However, SWE standards have several gaps that limitate its capabilities to achieve the sensor Web desires. In this paper, we address the problems related to the data format and the architectural style followed by the implementation of the SWE services. Indeed, we propose the adoption of the lightweight Representational State Transfer (REST) web services concept and the usage of JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) format as an alternative to the verbose XML one for the exchanged messages.