Service discovery for the Internet of Things: Comparison study of the approaches

The Internet of Things (IoT) has gained a significant attention in the last years. It covers multiple domains and applications such as smart home, smart healthcare, IT transportation...etc. The highly dynamic nature of the IoT environment brings to the service discovery new challenges and requirements. As a result, discovering the desirable services has become very challenging. In this paper, we aim to address the IoT service discovery problem and investigate the existing solutions to tackle this problem in many aspects, therefore we present a new and full comparative study of the most representative (or outstanding) service discovery approaches in the literature over four perspectives: (1) the IoT service description model, (2) the mechanism of IoT service discovery, (3) the adopted architecture and (4) the context awareness. After each of these perspectives, we discuss the existing solutions as well as the main challenges that face the service discovery issue in the IoT domain. Besides, we adopt a classification of the IoT service discovery approaches based on their mechanism of discovery, and we propose a set of requirements that need to be considered when defining an IoT service in the IoT domain.