1.Info: ICSOC PhD Symposium 2008

2.Abstract:This paper proposes a methodology to realize the Internet of Things in the Service-Centric environments.

3.Concepts: 

      Internet of Things(IoT): was first mentioned in an article of Forbes in . It was depicted as a world in which objects or people are equipped with a sensor which can report host’s location, identity or some other information via a wireless network.

      RFID: Radio-Frequency IDentification ; 

      SOC: Service-Oriented Computing

      EPC: Electronic Product Code ;  

      PML: Physical Markup Laguage ; 

      ONS: Object Naming Service

4.Problem Statement:

     The author proposes one of most important field of realization of the IoT is: software architecture design.  

     But there are some crucial chanllenges: lack of a common software fabric underlying, i.e.,  lack of how the softwares in the different environments can be combined to build larger, composite system.

     To successfully realize the “Internetof Things”, the following factors should be taken into consideration :

• Scalability
• Heterogeneity
• Manageability
• Openness(Interoperability)

    To  provide  the  above  features,  the  system  realizing  “Internet  of  Things” should be:

• a single, open architecture system
• require a minimum of performance from the tag technology embedded in the objects
• be flexible and adaptable to changes

Then the author suggest that SOA(Service-Oriented Architecture) is suitable for the solution level design for the "IoT".

     Because SOC is the computing paradigm that utilizes Web services as fundamental elements for developing applications and solutions. The services are self-described, platform-agnostic and loosely coupled. Then the service-centric environment composed by the services is naturally open, platform independent, flexible and adaptable..This architecture does not require the modules of the system to be isomorphic. 

5.Proposed Method:

    Proposed Architecture is:

1).There are four types services in the architecture:

• Provider Service(PS):it provides the collected RFID data. And it can specify the data accesslevel and format using the standard service description protocol.
• Object Naming Service(ONS): It is a service to get the required object information. It is used to answer intra-service queries.
• Discovery Service(DS): It is a service to break the query into sub-queries and find corresponding provider services to answer each sub-query, and then compose the answers together for the inter-service queries.
• Query Analyzing Service(QAS):It is a service to analyze a query, classifying the query as either intra-service or inter-service query.

2).The service in "IoT" has some unique characteristics:

• PS are software modules that offer read-only interfaces.
• each service represents an abstract location entity.

3).two query types:

• intra-service query: The queries  can be answered by the computations within one single service instance.
• inter-service query: The queries need two or more service instances involved in order to answer them. Use P2P technology to  realize interactions between individual service instances.

4).Data Model:

     The most challenging part of the design is what kind of data should be published and  how  should  it  be  stored  in  the  ONS  and  DS  so  that  the  query  can  be efficiently processed.  The author suggest a probabilistic data model such as Markov chain.

6.Conclusion:

     The research proposed an initial architecture design to realize the “IoT” in the service-centric environments And discussed the technical challenges and investigated the possibility of combining SOC and the RFID technology for this purpose. The author advocate that a P2P, Web service-based architecture could achieve the scalability of large-scale applications such as the “IoT".