Building a Global Generic Architecture for the Future Internet of Things (GGIoT)

The Internet of Things (IoT) connects physical objects and services to the Internet, enabling object-to-object and people-to-object communication. The 6A connectivity of the future IoT aims to allow people and objects to be connected anytime, anyplace, with anything and anyone, using any path/network and any service. However, due to heterogeneous resources, existing incompatible standards and difficult communication patterns, the IoT is still constrained to specific devices, networks, and applications. As the standards of Web Services have been accepted globally, most existing IoT platforms use Web Services to resolve interoperability issues among heterogeneous resources. Web Services were designed for traditional Internet applications, and have many limitations, such as centralized communication patterns and higher overheads. Human-readable protocols are unsuitable for object-to-object communication in the IoT. Other issues, such as: lack of applications and modularized services, high cost of sensory devices and application development, and difficult deployment, also hinder the common use of the IoT. This thesis proposes a generic architecture for the future IoT. It is independent of particular devices, networks, systems, platforms, domains, services and applications. Objects and services are virtualized as software components in distributed proxies. The IoT architecture can minimize object description in transmission messages to fit resource-constrained devices, such as passive RFID tags. Lower physical size and cost for devices are possible. It builds ontologies for end-to-end service to support coordination, composition, optimization and automation. This thesis evaluates how the proposed architecture Global Generic Internet of Things (GGIoT) can meet the 6A connectivity requirement of the future IoT. GGIoT has minimal network overhead and low device requirements. The architecture is evaluated using case studies to illustrate basic programming models including monitoring and tracking, object-to-object communication, service composition, discovery based on dynamic property values, service optimization and automation