Abstraction of Heterogeneous IoT Devices for Management of Smart Homes

Abstract

During the last few years, smart homes became reality due to the popularization of Internet of Things (IoT). This kind of environment is composed of several types of IoT heterogeneous wireless devices, where each one has singular characteristics and a particular set of protocols. This fact makes the smart home very complex network to deploy new applications and services. Therefore, a smart home needs an approach to abstract the communication with these IoT devices, improving the flexibility and the manageability of the applications running on the top of the smart home, as well as the network infrastructure as a whole. Within this context, this paper proposes a middleware for communication abstraction of IoT devices in smart homes. The proposed middleware allows the communication with devices through a high-level interface, enabling the management of heterogeneous IoT devices as a generic interface. The experiments performed in a real testbed scenario suggest that the proposed middleware is scalable and improves the management of IoT devices.