Name-Centric Service Architecture for Cyber-Physical Systems (Short Paper)

The goal of Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) is to enable easy cooperation of a large number of computers and orchestration of services that are connected via a network. However, SOA for wireless sensor networks (WSN) and cyber-physical systems (CPS) is still a challenging task. Consequently, for design and development of large CPS like WSNs connected to clouds, SOA has not yet evolved as an integral technology. One of the limiting issues is service registration and discovery. In large CPS discovery of services is tedious, mostly due to the fact that services are often semantically bound to a region or an application function while SOA forces service endpoints to be based on addresses of nodes. Also, today, SOA technologies are not used for service composition within sensor nodes and between sensor nodes, and even worse, different methods exist for service access in a WSN and in the backend. Therefore, service development differs largely in WSN and cloud. To overcome this limitation, we suggest a name-centric service architecture for cyber-physical systems. Our architecture is based on (a) using URNs instead of URLs to provide a service-centric architecture instead of service-or location-centric networking, (b) using the well-known CCNx protocol as a basis for our architecture which supports location and access transparency, and (c) employing CCN-WSN as the resource-efficient lightweight implementation for WSNs to build a name-based service bus for CPS. We evaluate the architecture by implementing an example application for facility management.