Service discovery for internet of things: a context-awareness perspective

Abstract

In Internet of Things (IoT), functionalities of devices are encapsulated as real-world services to interact with other things or traditional web services to realize the seamless integration physical world with information world, where service discovery plays an important role. However, the resource-constrained and mobility natures of devices and intermittent disconnection of wireless network result in services in IoT having highly dynamic environment, which asks for different requirements for context-aware service discovery approach than traditional web services and brings new challenges for service discovery in IoT. In this paper, we analyze the role of context and relations with entities in IoT firstly; then combing the characteristics of data in IoT, a common ontology based context model with the ability to handle uncertainty and temporal aspects of context is proposed and Dynamic Bayesian networks (DBN) is adopted to reason about these contexts for supporting to sense current situation. Finally, based on the context model and reasoning approach proposed, we present a context-aware service discovery architecture for IoT to provide an efficient infrastructure to support user-centric and environment-aware service provision.