An implementation realizing the tasking capabilities of Internet of things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is an infrastructure that interconnects uniquely identifiable devices using the Internet. By interconnecting everyday appliances (e.g., TV, oven, heater, lamp, door lock), various monitoring and physical mashup applications can be constructed to improve people's daily life. In general, IoT devices provide two main capabilities. Firstly, the sensing capability monitors devices' statuses or the environmental properties of their surroundings such as air temperature and humidity. Secondly, the tasking capability allows other devices or users to actuate devices via the Internet. From the client-server communication point-of-view, an IoT device can be regarded as a web service that receives requests from clients and return responses. In order to advertise its service capabilities, an IoT device needs a standard-based web service description, such as the WSDL and hRESTS. However, existing web service descriptions are usually based on verbose XML and are not suitable for resource-constraint IoT devices. Therefore, this research aims on defining a light-weight JSON-based web service description for IoT's tasking capability, as well as proposing a web service protocol to actuate IoT devices. The preliminary result shows that the proposed solution can be applied to existing IoT products and control them via the same web service protocol.