Services to the Field: An Approach for Resource Constrained Sensor/Actor Networks

More and more devices become network enabled and are integrated within one large, distributed system. The service-oriented paradigm is the main concept to implement this approach and to cope with the heterogeneity of the underlying network. However, resource constraints imposed by the underlying hardware, such as 8-bit micro controllers, require efficient protocols and often prohibit the use of technologies known from the Web service domain, the major implementation of the service-oriented paradigm. Nevertheless, a quick and seamless information flow between embedded devices and Web services is an important requirement for many application scenarios, e.g., real-time aware production management or the Internet of Things. Within this paper, we present an approach that allows to profit from the benefits of traditional SOA implementations, such as Web service interfaces and an IP compatible addressing scheme, and on the other hand can be implemented on resource constraint devices. The main idea is to use a data-centric processing paradigm at the device level and a gateway that mediates between the Web service and the embedded device world.