CCT: Connect and Control Things: A novel mobile application to manage M2M devices and endpoints

This paper presents a novel application that allows mobile clients to interact with M2M devices and endpoints in real time. The application "Connect and Control Things" (CCT) is designed to discover things, receive data from the sensors, control the actuators and generate alarms in real time. The novel capabilities of CCT are: (i) dynamic discovery of device and endpoint, (ii) real time interaction with sensors and actuators associated to M2M devices, (iii) benefit from Sensor Markup Language (SenML) representation, (iv) supporting extension of SenML capabilities for actuators and (v) learning actuators' resources and control them. The architectural design, prototypes implementation, flow of network operations and a real-life test scenario are illustrated. The prototype Android application registers higher CPU usage and power consumption due to intense network operations and parsing sensor metadata repeatedly. We have proposed several optimization techniques to reduce the CPU load, network data usage and overall power consumption. Two use cases of the application have been discussed. Finally the paper summarizes the contributions and concludes with the future research directions.