Facilitating sensor deployment, discovery and resource access using embedded web services

Abstract

Smart embedded objects such as sensors and actuators will become an important part of the Internet of Things. With recent technologies, it has now become possible to deploy a sensor network and interconnect it with IPv6 Internet. However, several manual configuration steps are still needed to integrate a sensor network within an existing networking environment. In this paper we describe a novel self-organization solution to facilitate the deployment of sensor networks and enable the discovery, end-to-end connectivity and service usage of these newly deployed sensor nodes. The proposed approach makes use of embedded web service technology, i.e. the IETF Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP). Automatic hierarchical discovery of CoAP servers is one of the key features, resulting in a browsable hierarchy of CoAP servers, up to the level of the sensor resources, which can be accessed both over CoAP and HTTP and through the use of either DNS names or IPv6 addresses. To demonstrate the feasibility of our approach we have implemented the solution and deployed it on a test setup, which is publicly accessible to everyone.