An IoT Unified Access Platform for Heterogeneity Sensing Devices Based on Edge Computing

With the rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT), a large number of heterogeneous sensing devices are accessed in their proprietary ways to IoT applications, formed “silos” application mode. The growth of IoT applications has been hampered by this mode due to the barriers of resource sharing of heterogeneous sensing devices. This paper proposes an IoT access platform deployed at the network edge near the sensing devices. This architecture can enable more responsive IoT applications and provide efficient privacy protection for sensitive data. We propose a general ontology-based resource description model of IoT devices to provide a consistent view of heterogeneous sensing devices for IoT applications in the cloud. Based on this model, we propose an adaptive access method to provide unified access, control, and management of IoT devices with various intelligence levels. The access platform turns the “silos” application mode of IoT into a horizontal application mode, supports applications to share and reuse the resources of IoT devices. We demonstrate the efficacy of our architecture with an application case study that highlights our proposed resource description model and adaptive access method and evaluate performance improvement with experiments.