An Integrated Approach to Common Problems in the Internet of Things

The recent advances in technology enabled transition to the Internet of Things (IoT), in which physical objects around us become an integral part of the global information system. A major technical challenge however is to make these numerous objects interact seamlessly with each other. The latest works related to concepts, such as Web of Things or Social Web of Things, partly address the issue. In our paper we further investigate the topic and point out several problems that need to be efficiently solved for the Internet of Things to work on large scale numbers. One of the main tasks is to make devices easily discoverable. Thus, an efficient way to handle and store their metadata is required. Another problem is connected with providing different models of inter-device communication, asynchronous being the most important, as many of today's widely used web standards were not designed for it. Finally, we propose a general cloud-based IoT architecture aimed at solving the above-described problems. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.