Translation error handling for multi-protocol SOA systems

The IoT research area has evolved to incorporate a plethora of messaging protocol standards, both existing and new, emerging as preferred communications means. The variety of protocols and technologies enable IoT to be used in many application scenarios. However, the use of incompatible communication protocols also creates vertical silos and reduces interoperability between vendors and technology platform providers. In many applications, it is important that maximum interoperability is enabled. This can be for reasons such as efficiency, security, end-to-end communication requirements etc. In terms of error handling each protocol has its own methods, but there is a gap for bridging the errors across protocols. Centralized software bus and integrated protocol agents are used for integrating different communications protocols. However, the aforementioned approaches do not fit well in all Industrial IoT application scenarios. This paper therefore investigates error handling challenges for a multi-protocol SOA-based translator. A proof of concept implementation is presented based on MQTT and CoAP. Experimental results show that multi-protocol error handling is possible and furthermore a number of areas that need more investigation have been identified.