Title: SmartData: an IoT-ready API for sensor networks

Authors: Antônio Augusto Fröhlich

Addresses: Software/Hardware Integration Lab, Federal University of Santa Catarina, Florianópolis, SC, 88040-900, Brazil

Abstract: Despite intense research on wireless sensor networks (WSN) in the last two decades, programmers still do not have a cohesive and expressive application programming interface (API) to model their applications and to connect them to the internet of things (IoT). In this paper, we introduced SmartData, a high-level API for WSN aiming at leveraging the myriad of features available on such networks while delivering a common abstraction for sensed data that facilitates application development without incurring significant overhead. SmartData is enriched with enough metadata to become self-contained regarding semantics, spatial location, timing, and trustfulness. It is meant to be the only application-visible construct in the platform and therefore implicitly mediates all system services, including communication, synchronisation, and the interaction with transducers and actuators, local or remote. Reading a SmartData implies in sensing. Writing to it defines a new setpoint for actuators. We demonstrate the concept through the automation of a solar building with a set of SmartData in C++.

Keywords: WSN; wireless sensor network; IoT; internet of things; sensing API; application programming interface; sensing data management.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSNET.2018.096264

International Journal of Sensor Networks, 2018 Vol.28 No.3, pp.202 - 210

Accepted: 04 Jul 2018
Published online: 20 Nov 2018 *

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