A Global IoT Device Discovery and Integration Vision

This paper presents the vision of establishing a global service for Global IoT Device Discovery and Integration (GIDDI). The establishment of a GIDDI will: (1) make IoT application development more efficient and cost-effective via enabling sharing and reuse of existing IoT devices owned and maintained by different providers, and (2) promote deployment of new IoT devices supported by a revenue generation scheme for their providers. More specifically, this paper proposes a distributed IoT blockchain ledger that is specifically designed for managing the metadata needed to describe IoT devices and the data they produce. This GIDDI Blockchain is Internet-owned (i.e., it is not controlled by any individual or organization) and is Internet-scaled (i.e., it can support the discovery and reuse billions of IoT devices). The paper also proposes a GIDDI Marketplace that provides the functionality needed for IoT device registration, query, integration, payment and security via the proposed GIDDI Blockchain. We outline the GIDDI Blockchain and Marketplace implementation. We also discuss ongoing research for automatically mining the IoT Device metadata needed for IoT Device query and integration from the data produce. This significantly reduces the need for IoT device providers to supply the metadata descriptions the devices and the data they produce during the registration of IoT Devices in the GIDDI Blockchain.