ioConnect: A Universal Embedded SDK for Connecting Smart Devices to Web3

An embedded software development kit (SDK) is an essential component in an IoT ecosystem. The existing embedded SDKs, while facilitating developers to build centralized, cloud-native IoT applications, are not able to meet the increasing requirements of connecting smart devices to Web3, in particular decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePINs). To close this gap, we present a universal, open-source embedded SDK called ioConnect in this paper. Built upon the emerging technologies such as the platform security architecture (PSA) and self-sovereign identity (SSI), ioConnect is the first embedded SD K that allows developers to connect smart devices to a decentralized network and create rich and trustworthy device-to-device and device-to-person relationships. ioConnect is designed with a layered architecture coupled with a flexible configuration utility and is able to support a wide range of smart devices with different processing capabilities and memory footprints. Our extensive performance evaluations on two resource-constrained smart devices demonstrate viability and effectiveness of ioConnect when used in practice.