ThingsDriver: A Unified Interoperable Driver for IoT Nodes

The Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the fastest-growing technologies in recent years. However, many IoT service providers design their IoT solutions with non-interoperable hard-ware, scenario-specific features, and unique architectures that make these deployments fragmented rather than collaborative. Collaborative IoT (C-IoT) systems are considered the natural evolution of the traditional IoT. Sharing the infrastructure is one of the main concepts that C-IoT depends on to create a collaborative environment between different applications. With the current fragmented IoT, these applications cannot share their infrastructure and data due to the lack of standards to organize the C-IoT space. In this paper, we introduced Unified Interoperable Driver for IoT (UIDI) nodes. UIDI uses a novel programming methodology that enables node interpreters to provide general-purpose firmware for IoT nodes. UIDI allows the users to configure IoT nodes according to their usage, preferences, and needs through the cloud. We developed a proof-of-concept prototype to demonstrate the feasibility and usability of the proposed UIDI using NodeMCU and Arduino-Uno. The performance of UIDI outperforms Firmata by 27%. In addition to that, the UIDI platform is a standalone node that connects directly to the cloud, whereas the Firmata node requires a host to be accessible from the cloud.