Identification of Bluetooth-Enabled IoT Devices Through Syntactic Similarity Techniques

Moving into 2019, the number of new devices is growing exponentially, expecting more than 50 billion Bluetooth-enabled devices to be worldwide connected by 2020. As a result, emerging back-end support technologies not only have to anticipate this dramatic increase of connected devices, but also their heterogeneity. Considering this existing gap in the Internet of Things (IoT) area, this paper proposes a mechanism for discovering, connecting, and identifying heterogeneous Bluetooth-enabled IoT devices of unknown device type, in order to be integrated into different platforms. This mechanism implements three (3) stages to successfully identify an unknown device. Initially, the discovery and the connection of both known and unknown devices take place so as to retrieve explicitly required specifications of these devices. Sequentially, the measurement of the syntactic similarity of all the devices' specifications and the comparison among the derived results occurs. Based on these results, the estimation of the overall syntactic similarity takes place, identifying finally the device type of the connected unknown devices. The prototype associated with this paper provides an example of this mechanism, demonstrating in detail each stage.