A network architecture for the Web of Things

Abstract

The "Web of Things" is emerging as an exciting vision for seamlessly integrating everyday objects like home appliances, digital picture frames, health monitoring devices and energy meters into the Internet using the Web's well-known standards and blueprints. The key idea is to represent resources on these devices as URIs and use HTTP verbs (GET, PUT, POST, DELETE) as the uniform interface to manipulate them. Unfortunately, practical considerations such as bandwidth or energy constraints, firewalls/NATs and mobility pose interesting challenges in the realization of this ideal vision. This paper describes these challenges, identifies some potential solutions and presents the design and implementation of a gateway-based network architecture to address these concerns. To the best of our knowledge, it represents the first attempt within the Web of Things community to tackle these issues in a comprehensive manner.