Architecture Supporting Discovery and Management of Heterogeneous Sensors for Smart System Using Generic Middleware

This Smart environments, starting from smart home to more complex one like smart city, demand efficient interoperation mechanism among different heterogeneous sensors including the discovery and the management of these devices. The diverse domains of applications also require interoperation among themselves. The middleware plays a key role to achieve this interoperation. The middleware is also responsible for providing abstractions to the application interfaces and device sensing. In the current article middleware architecture along with a method for efficient device interoperation by generating a generic device attributes (GDA) structure is presented. The middleware performs semantic analysis on the content of the device attributes while performing the discovery and managing the device. It supports, efficient way of sensor discovery, management and posting of sensed data. Smart irrigation and firming environment is considered as a use case here. The presented architecture is modular, based on object oriented concept and generic in nature. This can be further extended for any smart system. A future research scope of the proposed architecture is also discussed while concluding the article.