Platform Independent Connections to Internet of Things

Abstract: In the past few years, technology has been changing by leaps and bounds, within which a new topic has emerged as Internet of Things. These things serve as sensors/actuators, connected to the Internet and enabled to communicate with each other simultaneously in a P2P distributed manner. The sensors/actuators sense and generate contextual data in their surroundings in order to enable real-time context-aware behavior that make them more personalized and intelligent. This contextual information may be useful for human purposes like environment monitoring, home surveillance, elderly care, safety, security surveillance, etc. Moreover, smart mobile devices with incredible features have become hugely popular, the use of the Internet of Things would be much handier using smartphones to interact with sensors and also to generate information with its decorated sensors. The main aim of this thesis work is to create an extension for an add-in layer of the Internet of Things (SensibleThings Platform) architecture that adds functionalities like querying UCI value within the platform, connecting different mobile devices regardless of programming language, which has been done using the REST protocol. Furthermore, the intention is to build a P2P connection between the Java coded SensibleThings platform to a non-Java platform, i.e. iOS, by creating an Objective-C library to support dissemination of contextual information between the discrete platform in a distributed manner using JSON. Two servers have been created using Apache web server and sockets to connect with the Objective-C library to compare the performance of extension and library. The thesis work also presents the implementation of the extension and an Objective-C library, integrated to create proof-of-concept applications by developing an iOS application and Mac OS desktop application that can easily interact with the SensibleThings platform by requests through the REST protocol and getting the UCI value in JSON message format. Moreover, to know the best possible solution for the SensibleThings platform, a hybrid application has also been developed by using PhoneGap and JQueryMobile within XCode, which is compared with the iOS web app, and an evaluation of mobile applications using extension and library with two servers has also been performed. According to the results between the web server and sockets, the sockets act scalable and more stable than the web server when interacting with the SensibleThings platform; when comparing between the iOS and Mac app for performance, there is not much difference. The results also suggest that a hybrid app would be a better solution for the SensibleThings platform; it could be developed with less effort and be useful for a variety of mobile devices, which might be the best solution for the IoT in the future. Lastly, the conclusions includes possible future work to be supplemented, to make the IoT better in future.