Section: New Results

Interoperability assessment and Internet of Things

Participants : César Viho, Nanxing Chen, Anthony Baire.

The Internet of Things (IoT) brings new challenges to interoperability assessment by introducing the necessity to deal with non reliable environments connecting plenty billions of objects widely distributed. In this context, the IETF Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) has been designed, which is an application-layer protocol on keeping in mind the various issues of constrained environment to realize interoperations with constrained networks and nodes.

As one of the most important protocol for the future Internet of Things, the number of smart objects using CoAP is expected to grow substantially. For CoAP applications to be widely adopted by the industry, interoperability testing is required to ensure that CoAP implementations from different vendors work well together. Therefore, in the recent period, we propose an interoperability testing methodology using a passive approach. Contrary to the classical testing method used in conventional interoperability testing events, which is done by actively stimulating the implementations and verifying the outputs, we apply passive testing. It is a technique based only on observation [47] . Its non-intrusive nature makes it appropriate for interoperability testing, especially in the context of IoT. We have also developed a tool that implement this passive method that has been used successfully to test CoAP implementations during the two CoAP Plugtest interoperability sessions organized by ETSI and IPSO Alliance [44] . Our contributions and originality of this work published in [46] are three-fold: (i) A new testing method using a passive approach. (ii) As IoT implies providing services in lossy networks, we also take into account fundamental CoAP implementations interoperability testing in lossy context. (iii) Contrary to manual verification used in conventional interoperability testing events, the verification procedure has been automatized by a test validation tool, which increases the test efficiency while reducing testing time and costs.