Integrating Mobile IoT Devices into the Arrowhead Framework Using Web of Things

Interoperability is one of the main issues concerning the Internet of Things (IoT). The Arrowhead Framework (AHF) is an open-source platform that aims at tackling this problem. In this work, we first integrate a set of legacy IoT devices (i.e., an ECG and a smart plug) into the AHF by leveraging W3C Web of Things (WoT) as an interface between the two worlds. The result is an architecture where AHF consumers are deployed in a local cloud and consume Web Things, which can be deployed on IoT devices as well as on servers at the network edge to provide edge computing services. In this context, IoT device mobility raises a problem. When the IoT device moves, indeed, the edge-hosted service needs to follow it to preserve proximity, which is key to edge computing. In this case, the IP addresses of both the Web Things (i.e., the one hosted on the IoT device and the one hosted at the edge) may change, causing problems of mutual reachability after mobility/migration. WoT does not currently handle this issue. In this work, we extend WoT in this direction and evaluate our approach over a small-scale edge computing testbed.