Thing Broker: A Twitter for Things

Ricardo A. P. Almeida, Michael Blackstock, Rodger Lea, Roberto Calderon, Antonio F. Prado, Hélio Crestana

Guardia

Outline

  Introduction

  Related Work

  Thing Broker

  Early Applications

  Conclusions and Future Work

Web of Things   Leverages the Web to support the Internet of

Things vision and connect islands of things

  Relies on standard web protocols to name, access, find and use things (HTTP and RESTful interfaces)

  Can expand the notion of things: not only smart objects with embedded computing capabilities, but any uniquely identifiable person, place or thing, even services

Challenges & Motivation   Huge variety of applications & constraints:

  Resource sharing and interaction between devices (mobile, public displays)

  Aggregation and visualization of data from users, mobile phones and situated sensors

  Access to smart meter monitoring data

  Real Time Communication (emergency response)

  Context aware applications

Research Question

  What are the basic abstractions and fundamental platform features needed to support a wide range of WoT applications?

  Key Contributions   Flexible thing/event abstractions

  Twitter-like model for thing relationships   Initial implementation and early prototype

applications

Background   Evolution of MAGIC Broker 2

  Channels as containers for events and state to represent things

  Needed flexible thing relationships and event aggregation

  Related to other hubs, but not just just for sensor data   WoTKit   Xively   Open Sen.se   Thing Speak

  Spacebrew – connect publishers to subscribers

  Inspired by Twitter’s simplicity and power

Thing Broker

  Key abstractions: thing and events

Thing Broker

  Relationships based on the Twitter communication abstraction: Follow/Unfollow

  Web-based object referencing – things have URLs   Web-based object access - HTTP   Publish/subscribe based communication: push and pull-

based event delivery

Modeling Things and Relationships

thing-phone

thing-user

thing-lamp

thing-tv

follows

follows

follows follows

ThingBroker

Phone App TV App Smart Home

Server

Model

Deployment

Thing Broker

Thing Broker in action

!!!

Collaborative Picture Galley

Thing Broker in action

Digital Message Board !!

Thing Broker in action

!!!

Collaborative Picture Galley

Thing Broker in action

Meeting Notifier for a Healthcare Scenario

! !

Thing Broker in action

Meeting Notifier for a Healthcare Scenario

! !

Conclusions

  Thing Broker abstractions and communications model provides a uniform interface to different Web of Things entities

  Using a single thing abstraction allows all sorts of objects, from physical sensors to high-level services to be modeled by an application

  The following/follows relationship model provides an abstraction for publish/subscribe style asynchronous communication between things

Conclusions

  Having both push and pull is useful for receiving real time and historical events

  Based on application development and experiments to date, the Thing Broker is a simple, and flexible, yet powerful platform for application development

Future Work

  Further investigation about authentication and encryption is required

  Support for the mobility of things as well as the production and consumption of continuous data flows must be addressed

  Adding thing discovery and persistent thing queries

Thank You =)

Source Code: https://github.com/ubc-magic/thingbroker Documentation: https://github.com/ubc-magic/thingbroker/

wiki/Thing-Broker-API

References [1] Blackstock, M., Kaviani, N., Lea, R. and Friday, A. MAGIC Broker 2: An Open and Extensible Platform for the Internet of Things. Internet of Things 2010 International Conference (IoT 2010), 1–8. [2] Blackstock, M. and Lea, R. IoT Mashups with the WoTKit. 3rd International Conference on The Internet of Things (IOT 2012), 159 –166. [3] Gubbi, J., Buyya, R., Slaven, M. and Marimuthu, P. Internet of Things (IoT): A vision, architectural elements, and future directions. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2013.01.010.. [4] Guinard, D. A Web of Things Application Architecture. PhD Thesis. ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland, 2011. http://www.webofthings.org/dom/thesis.pdf. [5] Open Sen.se Feel, Act, Make sense, Feel, Act, Make sense. http://open.sen.se/ [6] Ponnekanti, S.R., Johanson, B., Kiciman, E. and Fox, A. “Portability, Extensibility and Robustness in iROS,” IEEE PerCom, 2003, p. 11. [7] The Internet of Things – ThingSpeak. https://thingspeak.com/. [8] Xively - The Internet of Things is Open for Business” https://www.xively.com