Connect and Control Things: Integrating Lightweight IoT Framework into a Mobile Application

Mobile applications running on smart devices are important enablers for Internet of Things (IoT). This paper presents a novel mobile application called "Connect and Control Things" (CCT) which integrates a lightweight IoT framework into smartphones and tablets. The framework is designed to discover & interact with things, reason with M2M data, provide configuration management facilities along with subscription and notification functionalities. The novel capabilities of CCT are: (i) lightweight search engine based dynamic discovery of physical things, (ii) interaction with both sensors and actuators using Sensor Markup Language (SenML) and its extensions, (iii) integrating a lightweight reasoning engine to infer high level abstraction, (iv) CoRE Link Format based configuration management and (v) support for both smart and legacy things regardless of communication technologies. An IoT architecture is presented along with a prototype implementation details for Android powered devices. Uses of the prototype mobile application in home automation scenarios are outlined. The performance of CCT is evaluated in terms of memory requirement, CPU usage and power consumption. Experimental results establish that the overall design and implementation of CCT are lightweight which encourages the adoption of CCT. It enables offering consumer centric services for home automation domain. Finally the paper concludes with future research directions.