Message-Based Communication for Heterogeneous Internet of Things Systems

The Internet of Things (IoT) domain presents a wide spectrum of technologies for building IoT applications. The requirements are varying from one application to another granting uniqueness to each IoT system. Each application demands custom implementations to achieve efficient, secure and cost-effective environments. They pose a set of properties that cannot be addressed by a single-based protocol IoT network. Such properties are achievable by designing a heterogeneous IoT system, which integrates diverse IoT protocols and provides a network management solution to efficiently manage the system components. This paper proposes an IoT message-based communication model applied atop the IoT protocols in order to achieve functional scalability and network management transparency agnostic to the employed communication protocol. The paper evaluates the proposed communication model and proves its functional scalability in a heterogeneous IoT system. The experimental assessment compares the payload size of the proposed system with respect to the LwM2M standard, a protocol designed specifically for IoT applications. In addition, the paper discusses the energy consumption introduced by the proposed model as well as the options available to reduce such impact.