Interoperability in Open IoT Platforms: WoT-FIWARE Comparison and Integration

The rapid and exponential growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) has been generating a new breed of technologies that introduce several different protocols and interfaces. The Web of Things (WoT) architecture stands out as an emerging and potential solution to improve interoperability across IoT platforms by describing well-defined software interfaces. However, few studies analyze and compare WoT to other interoperability solutions proposed in the IoT literature. In this paper, we attempt to bridge the gap by three main contributions. First, we qualitative compare the WoT approach with the well-known FIWARE-based interoperability solution.Second, based on the previous analysis, we design and implement a connector to bridge the WoT architecture to the FIWARE ecosystem. Third, we conduct a performance analysis emulating a real IoT-based environment to understand scalability, response time, and computer resource usage of the two interoperability solutions. The results reveal that conceptual design choices impact the applications’ performance: the WoT architecture effectively enables interoperability across IoT Platforms, though it incorporates several characteristics that hinder the implementation of applications. On the other hand, the FIWARE IoT Agent solution is platform-specific. Hence new implementations are needed for each different IoT data model.