Streamlining IoT system development with open standards

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is bringing Internet connectivity to a wide range of devices which results in an increasing number of products for smart home, industry 4.0 and/or smart cities. Even though IoT has the ambition to reach an increasing amount of devices and be scalable across different domains, lack of interoperability inhibits this scope to be attained. Recent standardization efforts by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) are addressing the interoperability problem by the means of Thing Description (TD) that allows humans and machines to understand the capabilities and communication interfaces of IoT devices. In this paper, we show a more systematic and streamlined development of IoT devices and systems that relies on the TD standard. We introduce three different complementary methods that can be applied independently in the different stages of the development, or as a framework to streamline the development of IoT devices and systems. As a result of using the TD standard, interoperability between IoT devices of various stakeholders is ensured from early stages and the time to market is reduced.