Service discovery

Standard service discovery at the individual object level does not address the needs of applications orchestrating large numbers of smart objects. Instead, a high-level approach which provides constructs to specifying subsets of interest is needed. Our approach allows developers to introduce application-specific concepts (e.g., regrouping parking spaces into lots or districts) at the design time and then these can be used to express discovery operations. Following our design-driven development approach, these concepts are used to generate code to support and guide the programming phase.

Data gathering

Applications need to acquire data from a large number of objects through a variety of delivery models. For instance, air pollution sensors across a city may only push data to the relevant applications when pollution levels exceed tolerated levels. Tracking sensors, however, might determine the location of vehicles and send the acquired measurements to applications periodically (e.g., 10 min. intervals). Data delivery models need to be introduced at design time since they have a direct impact on the application’s program structure. In doing so, the delivery models used by an application can be checked against sensor features early in the development process.

Data processing