title: Bindings and RESTlets: A Novel Set of CoAP-Based Application Enablers to Build IoT Applications.
abstract: Sensors and actuators are becoming important components of Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Today, several approaches exist to facilitate communication of sensors and actuators in IoT applications. Most communications go through often proprietary gateways requiring availability of the gateway for each and every interaction between sensors and actuators. Sometimes, the gateway does some processing of the sensor data before triggering actuators. Other approaches put this processing logic further in the cloud. These approaches introduce significant latencies and increased number of packets. In this paper, we introduce a CoAP-based mechanism for direct binding of sensors and actuators. This flexible binding solution is utilized further to build IoT applications through RESTlets. RESTlets are defined to accept inputs and produce outputs after performing some processing tasks. Sensors and actuators could be associated with RESTlets (which can be hosted on any device) through the flexible binding mechanism we introduced. This approach facilitates decentralized IoT application development by placing all or part of the processing logic in Low power and Lossy Networks (LLNs). We run several tests to compare the performance of our solution with existing solutions and found out that our solution reduces communication delay and number of packets in the LLN.
authors.affiliation: Department of Information Technology (INTEC), Ghent University-iMinds, Technologiepark-Zwijnaarde 15, 9052 Ghent, Belgium. girum.ketema@intec.ugent.be.|Information Communication Technology Development Directorate, Jimma University, P.O. Box 378, Jimma, Ethiopia. girum.ketema@intec.ugent.be.
authors.forename: Girum Ketema
authors.initials: GK
authors.lastname: Teklemariam
authors.affiliation: Department of Information Technology (INTEC), Ghent University-iMinds, Technologiepark-Zwijnaarde 15, 9052 Ghent, Belgium. floris.vandenabeele@intec.ugent.be.
authors.forename: Floris
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Van Den Abeele
authors.affiliation: Department of Information Technology (INTEC), Ghent University-iMinds, Technologiepark-Zwijnaarde 15, 9052 Ghent, Belgium. ingrid.moerman@intec.ugent.be.
authors.forename: Ingrid
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Moerman
authors.affiliation: Department of Information Technology (INTEC), Ghent University-iMinds, Technologiepark-Zwijnaarde 15, 9052 Ghent, Belgium. piet.demeester@intec.ugent.be.
authors.forename: Piet
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Demeester
authors.affiliation: Department of Information Technology (INTEC), Ghent University-iMinds, Technologiepark-Zwijnaarde 15, 9052 Ghent, Belgium. jeroen.hoebeke@intec.ugent.be.
authors.forename: Jeroen
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Hoebeke
keywords: CoAP; Internet of Things; IoT application; RESTlets; in-network processing; resource observation; sensor/actuator binding