A Web Service Protocol Realizing Interoperable Internet of Things Tasking Capability

The Internet of Things (IoT) is an infrastructure that interconnects uniquely-identifiable devices using the Internet. By interconnecting everyday appliances, various monitoring, and physical mashup applications can be constructed to improve human’s daily life. In general, IoT devices provide two main capabilities: sensing and tasking capabilities. While the sensing capability is similar to the World-Wide Sensor Web, this research focuses on the tasking capability. However, currently, IoT devices created by different manufacturers follow different proprietary protocols and are locked in many closed ecosystems. This heterogeneity issue impedes the interconnection between IoT devices and damages the potential of the IoT. To address this issue, this research aims at proposing an interoperable solution called tasking capability description that allows users to control different IoT devices using a uniform web service interface. This paper demonstrates the contribution of the proposed solution by interconnecting different IoT devices for different applications. In addition, the proposed solution is integrated with the OGC SensorThings API standard, which is a Web service standard defined for the IoT sensing capability. Consequently, the Extended SensorThings API can realize both IoT sensing and tasking capabilities in an integrated and interoperable manner.