A process-based Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is envisaged as a unified network of `smaller' networks that live on the fringes of the Internet, such as systems that monitor and control buildings, industrial plants, the power grid, etc. The Internet Protocol (IP) has been promoted as the transport glue that implements this vision. Although we observe a converged view from the various application domains that their gateways should adopt IP, it is clear that the path to full adoption is long. The gateways may impose very specific requirements of security, resilience to failures, ease of maintenance and upgrade. We present the design goals of an enhanced architecture for the IoT that can reduce such concerns, paving the way for faster adoption of IP in the IoT. We argue that the functions one needs to perform in IoT networks of various application domains can be summarised in a small group of basic request-response operations, which traverse gateways and act as the transport layer. We describe how more complex functions, abstracted into server-based processes, can then be executed by the basic transport operations. With this approach we aim to reduce the technology-specific functions of IoT gateways, which now even become transparent, at best.