IEEE Access (Jan 2018)
A OneM2M-Compliant Stacked Middleware Promoting IoT Research and Development
Abstract
Internet of Things' (IoT) applications keep emerging in all living and production scenarios. However, development tasks of support, communication, and computing are usually troublesome. An IoT middleware that completes such common basic tasks and assists advanced development is desired. Numerous general-purpose IoT instances have been tried in both academia and industry, while each has its own advantages and disadvantages. We abstract their characteristics into an ideal concept then build a reliable, modular, and oneM2M-compliant middleware accordingly. Our contributions include: proposing a stack of support-communication-computing to integrate excellent open-source projects; devising techniques variable and McSugar to enable flexible uniform human-thing interactions; and building implementation foundations for cutting-edge technologies such as fog computing and semantic reasoning. This middleware has been verified and applied: the case of field-cloud computing shows its efficacy in facilitating IoT research; the case of smart floriculture proves its capability in boosting IoT development. In short, with this middleware, developers and researchers can focus on top-level requirements of IoT development or experiment, instead of being trapped in the underlying technologies.
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