Section: New Software and Platforms

MobIoT: Service-oriented Middleware for the Mobile IoT

Participant : Valérie Issarny [correspondent] .

MobIoT is a service-oriented middleware aimed at the mobile Internet of Things (IoT), which in particular deals with the ultra-large scale, heterogeneity and dynamics of the target networking environment. MobIoT offers novel probabilistic service discovery and composition approaches, and wraps legacy access protocols to be seamlessly executed by the middleware. The middleware exposes two levels of service abstractions: Thing as a service (on the service provider side); and Things measurements/actions as a service (on the service consumer side).

Key features of MobIoT lie in: (i) the exploitation of ontologies to overcome the heterogeneity of the Things network, (ii) the introduction of probabilistic approaches for both registering and retrieving networked things so as to filter out the ones that are redundant with already known alternatives, and finally, (iii) the exploitation of Thing services composition for responding to user queries asking information about the physical world so as to ease interaction with such a complex and dynamic networking environment.

MobIoT is implemented using Java and the Android platform, and consists of two complementary components: The MobIoT Mobile middleware and the MobIoT Web Service. The MobIoT Mobile middleware is deployed on mobile devices (e.g., smartphones, tablets, sensor devices). It wraps: (i) the Query component that enables the querying of the physical world, (ii) the Registration component that deals with the probabilistic registration of local sensors and actuators, (iii) the domain ontology that allows reasoning about the features of Things, and (iv) the Sensor Access component that enables the sensor data retrieval and exposure. The MobIoT Web Service wraps: (i) the Registry component that keeps tracks of the registered services, (ii) the probabilistic Lookup component that allows retrieving relevant services in a scalable way, and (iii) the Composition & Estimation component to answer queries over the physical world using available Thing services, and finally domain and devices ontologies.

The MobIoT middleware is available for download under an open source license at http://mobiot.ow2.org .