The Web of Things: Enabling the Physical World to the Web

The Web of Things: Enabling
the Physical World to the Web

Andreas Kamilaris and Andreas Pitsillides

Johannesburg, South Africa April 2012 1

Talk Schedule University of Cyprus

• Motivation
• The Internet of Things
• The Web of Things Practice
• History of the Web of Things
• Building the Web of Things
• Exemplary Application Domains
• Concluding Remarks
• Future Challenges
2

Motivation University of Cyprus

20 years on, Vision or Reality?
4


It's a smart world?
‘The real and the digital worlds are converging,
bringing much greater efficiency and lots of new
opportunities’ http://www.economist.com/node/17388368?story_id=17388368

WHAT if the two worlds exist, the real one and its digital reflection?
• A Real world - full of sensors, picking up everything from
movement to smell.
• A Digital world, a construction built of software - takes in all
that information and automatically acts on it.
• E.g. If a door opens in the real world, so does its virtual equivalent. If the
temperature in the room with the open door falls below a certain level, the
digital world automatically turns on the heat.
Vision of Prof David Gelernter, Yale University, in early 1990s in his book ―Mirror Worlds‖.

Two decades later that sounds like science fiction. But does it?
5


The real and the digital worlds are converging due
to:
• emergence of connected sensors
and embedded devices (currently,
mostly living in their microcosm, but could be
interconnected in the ‗big web‘, sensing and
acting on the environment)
• new ubiquitous wireless networks http://www.economist.com/node/
17388368?story_id=17388368

and communication techniques
and standards
• activities of humans themselves. ‘For e.g. the micro-blogging
service Twitter’s 160m users
send out nearly 100m tweets
a day.
When they see, hear or read
something, they type it into
their computer or
smartphone, 140 characters
at a time.’!!

Smart systems - The next big thing ? 6


So,
• Sensors are becoming an integral part in our life.
• New sensor and communication technologies are
appearing, some with Internet support. (e.g. sensor networks,
RFIDs, short-range wireless communications, real-time localization)
• Prices for embedded hardware have effectively dropped.
• High heterogeneity is present in pervasive environments.

How do we bridge these technologies together?
How can heterogeneous physical things communicate
and interact?

7


The Internet is a solution!
• An increasing number of embedded devices are
supporting the IP protocol, thus many physical
objects will have direct connectivity to the Internet.

thus the Internet of Things (IoT).

which includes technologies and
research disciplines that enable
the Internet to reach out into the
real world of physical objects.

8


Large sums spent on smart-infrastructure projects; some
countries made smart systems a priority of industrial policy. E.g.
• IoT is central to European Union‘s ―Digital Agenda‖ and China announced a
plan with clear guidelines for IoT.

There is real need for such systems
• physical infrastructure is ageing
• health-care costs are exploding
• money is tight, ....

Can use resources more intelligently, e.g.
• Monitoring patients remotely  can be much cheaper and safer than
keeping them in hospital.
• A bridge equipped with the right sensors  can tell engineers when it
needs to be serviced.
• Today power grids, transport systems and water-distribution systems
are essentially networks of dumb pipes  make smart.
• If power grid in America were 5% more efficient, it would save greenhouse emissions
equivalent to 53m cars.
• congested roads cost the country, e.g. in 2007 in US 4.2 billion working hours lost and 10.6
billion litres of wasted petrol.
• utilities around the world lose between 25% and 50% of treated water to leaks 9

The Internet of Things (IoT) University of Cyprus

Vision: A network of objects, where all things are uniquely and
universally addressable, identified and managed by computers in the
same way humans can.

The question is:
If wireless objects (e.g.
sensor networks)
represent a future of
“billions of information
devices embedded in
the physical world,”
why should they not
An enabler for
run the standard many ‗smart‘
internetworking systems and
protocol? applications

Thus, the Internet can penetrate into the real world of physical objects.
11

IoT Initiatives: 6LoWPAN University of Cyprus

Low-power Wireless Personal Area Network (LoWPAN)
• LoWPAN is a simple, low-cost, wireless communication
network for constrained applications with limited power.
• 6LoWPAN is an adaption layer that allows efficient IPv6
communication over IEEE 802.15.4.
• turns IEEE 802.15.4 into the next IP-enabled link
• offers wide-scale connectivity, open-system based
interoperability, and interoperability between low-power
devices and IP devices
• Leverages well-known IP-based knowledge and practices
• Imports well-known capabilities of IPv6 to low-power devices.

uIPv6
12

The IoT in Home Automation University of Cyprus

Home automation solutions in comparison to IPv6 (6LoWPAN).

―Internet technology, utilizing IPv6, will become the future
standard in home automation.‖
Matthias Kovatsch et al., Embedding Internet Technology for Home Automation, in
Proceedings of ETFA, Bilbao, Spain, September 2010. 13

Internet-enabled Practices University of Cyprus

The IoT influences enterprise operations.

SenseAware combines an in-package sensing device with a
comprehensive web-based information platform.
SenseAware. Online at: http://www.senseaware.com/ 14

Internet-enabled Prototypes (‗smart objects‘) University of Cyprus

http://www.nabaztag.com (left)

http://www.chumby.com/ (right)
15

More Prototypes… University of Cyprus

Juan Ignacio Vazquez and Diego Lopez-De-Ipina, Social devices: autonomous artifacts that
communicate on the internet, in IOT‘08, 2008. (left)

Anders Wallberg et al., Socially intelligent interfaces for increased energy awareness in the
home, in IOT‘08, 2008. (right) 16

Even More Prototypes… University of Cyprus

http://sensorapp.net/?p=387 (left)

http://bubblino.com/ (right)
17

The Web of Things (WoT) University of Cyprus

Connectivity at the network layer is nice…

… but what about the application layer?

The WoT is a notion where everyday devices and sensors
are connected by fully integrating them to the Web.

Based on the success of the Web 2.0, this concept is
about reusing well-accepted and understood Web
standards to connect constrained devices.

19

The WoT Practice University of Cyprus

The WoT practice mainly follows these steps:
1. Connect embedded devices to the Internet,
through IPv4 or IPv6.
2. Embed Web servers on these devices.
3. Model their services in a resource-oriented way.

Directly Web-enabling Vs using a Gateway
20

WoT basic ingredients for wide scale adoption University of Cyprus

• Internet capable (IP) devices (with direct Web server/Web-
based ubiquitous middleware)
• facilitates uniform interaction amongst devices and end-users
• Universal addressability (can be provided by IPv6),
device discovery, and semantics-based service
description
• Proven and scalable Web-based technologies
• Web techniques such as HTTP caching and push
messaging, can facilitate a well performing, fully Web-based
smart system.
• Web-based service/information retrieval for the real
world (e.g. a Google for physical things)
21

REST and Resource-Oriented Architectures University of Cyprus

REST is a lightweight architectural style which basically defines how
to use the HTTP application protocol as an application interface to
the world of smart objects.
REST Vs Web Services (WS-*)

A resource-oriented architecture is about four concepts:
1. Resources.
2. Their names (URIs).
3. The links between them.
4. Their representations (HTML, JSON, XML).

Resources can be manipulated with:
1. GET to retrieve a representation of a resource.
2. POST represents an insert or update.
3. PUT to alter the state of a resource.
4. DELETE to delete resources.
22

The Cooltown project University of Cyprus

One of the first projects to envision Web presence for
physical elements, to offer the web's high degree of
interoperability for interactions with devices.

each entity in the physical world has an
associated web resource: a web
presence; no need to load new software
or reconfigure existing software

Tim Kindberg et al., People, places, things: web presence for the real world, in Mobile Network
Applications, 7(5):365–376, 2002. 24

Web-based Ubiquitous Middleware University of Cyprus

pREST: A RESTful protocol for pervasive spaces.
• An early initiative for a Web-based ubiquitous middleware.

W. Drytkiewicz et al., pREST: a REST-based protocol for pervasive systems, in IEEE
International Conference on Mobile Ad-hoc and Sensor Systems, pages 340–348, 2004.
25

Web-based Ubiquitous Middleware University of Cyprus

Web-based Middleware for Smart Spaces.
• Device/Service Discovery based on Zeroconf mDNS.
• The Web as a platform for ubiquitous applications.

Christian Prehofer et al., Towards the web as a platform for ubiquitous applications in smart
spaces, in RSPSI at Ubicomp, 2007. 26

Web-based Large-Scale Sensor Platforms University of Cyprus

Online, global sensor platforms enable people to share, discover and
monitor in real-time sensor, energy and environmental data from
objects, sensors and buildings that are connected to the Web, from
around the world.

The most well-known are Pachube, SenseWeb, IrisNet, G-Sense.
Pachube. Online at: www.pachube.com
27

Directly Web-enabling Physical Things University of Cyprus

Embedding Web servers on sensors and WSN is a recent
development...

Lars Schor et al., Towards a Zero-Configuration Wireless Sensor Network Architecture for
Smart Buildings, in BuildSys, 2009.

Dogan Yazar and Adam Dunkels, Efficient Application Integration in IP-based Sensor
Networks, in BuildSys, 2009. 29

Discovering locally the WoT University of Cyprus

Multicast DNS
• Multicast DNS (mDNS) is a way of using familiar DNS
programming interfaces for enabling local discovery of
embedded devices.

S. Cheshire and M. Krochmal, Multicast DNS, IETF Internet Draft, draft-cheshire-dnsext-
multicastdns-15, December, 2011.
30

Discovering globally the WoT University of Cyprus

Dyser real-time search engine.
• Discovering ubiquitous services in real-time through the Web.

Benedikt Ostermaier et al., A real-time search engine for the web of things, In Proc. of the
Internet of Things 2010 Conference, Tokyo, Japan, 2010.
31

Describing the WoT University of Cyprus

Web Applications Description Language (WADL)
• A machine-readable, XML-based description language for
Web applications.

Web Applications Description Language (WADL). Online at:http://wadl.java.net/ 32

Semantically Describing the WoT University of Cyprus

SOAM: Describing things through Semantic Web technologies.

Capabilities

Context
Information

Constraints

Juan Vazquez et al.,. SOAM: An Environment Adaptation Model for the Pervasive Semantic
Web, in ICCSA, volume 3983 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 108–117.
Springer Berlin, Heidelberg, 2006.
33

Composing the WoT University of Cyprus

Physical Mashups exploit real-world services offered by physical
devices and combine them using the same tools and techniques of
classic Web mashups.

Ambient meter
application

Dominique Guinard and Vlad Trifa, Towards the web of things: Web mashups for embedded
devices, in MEM Workshop of WWW Conference, Spain, 2009. 34

Facilitating Composition of the WoT University of Cyprus

Mobile Framework for Physical Mashups

The framework is composed of four main parts:
1. Web-enabled devices tagged with small 2D bar-codes.
2. Virtual services on the Web.
3. The mashup server framework.
4. Mobile mashup editors.

Dominique Guinard, Mashing up Your Web-Enabled Home, in ICWE 2010, Vienna, 2010.
35

Sharing the WoT University of Cyprus

Sharing physical things using social networking.

D. Guinard et al., Sharing Using Social Networks in a Composable Web of Things, In Proc. of
the 1st WoT Workshop at IEEE PerCom, 2010.
36

Messaging at the WoT University of Cyprus

RMS-RESTful Message System

• HTTP not best for building WSN
applications because of its
request/response nature.
• Web push tools and techniques have
enabled the development of event-
driven applications directly over the
Web.
• RESTful messaging for building open
and programmable distributed sensing
applications.

Vlad Trifa, Dominique Guinard, Vlatko Davidovski, Andreas Kamilaris and Ivan Delchev. Web
Messaging for Open and Scalable Distributed Sensing Applications. In International
Conference on Web Engineering (ICWE 2010), pages 129–143, Vienna, Austria, July 2010. 37

Caching at the WoT University of Cyprus

Web caching as a tool for saving bandwidth, energy and time.
• Web caching is very important for the Embedded Web!
e.g. adding IPv6 on sensor motes affects their performance and energy
consumption. Can decrease by exploiting the HTTP caching feature.

Andreas Kamilaris and Andreas Pitsillides, HomeWeb: An Application Framework for Web-
based Smart Homes, In Proc. of the 18th International Conference on Telecommunications
(ICT 2011), Ayia Napa, Cyprus, May 2011. 38

Applying the Web of Things
in Real-Life Scenarios

Exemplary application domains University of Cyprus

The WoT in:
• Smart metering
• Smart homes and energy-aware home environments
• Social interactions and networking
• Competitions for energy efficiency in local
neighbourhoods
• Country-scale comparisons of domestic electrical
consumption
• Logistics
• The urban environment
• The smart grid of electricity 40

Smart Metering in General University of Cyprus

Smart meters are sensor devices that measure in real-time the
energy consumption of houses. Smart power outlets are wireless
devices that measure the electricity footprint of various electrical
devices and control their operation.

Timely electrical consumption feedback through smart metering, is
believed to reduce electrical consumption by a fraction of 5-15%.
Whole Home Vs Device-specific Approaches 41

The WoT in Smart Metering University of Cyprus

eMeter

• It employs a smart electricity meter to provide real-time
feedback on a mobile phone, through a Web interface.
• The system can disaggregate overall electricity consumption by
forcing the users to manually switch specific devices on or off.
Markus Weiss, Dominique Guinard, Thorsten Staake, and Wolf Roediger. eMeter: An
interactive energy monitor. In Proc. of International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing
(Ubicomp), Orlando, Florida, USA, September 2009 42

The WoT in Smart Metering University of Cyprus

Energie Visible: Device-level metering.

• It utilizes residential smart meters to visualize in real-time the
energy consumption of the appliances.
• Web-based interface.
Markus Weiss Dominique Guinard and Vlad Trifa, Energie Visible. Online at:
http://www.webofthings.com/energievisible/ 43

The energy-aware Smart Home University of Cyprus

• Home residents can use their mobile phones as magic lenses to
view the energy consumption of their appliances, just by pointing
out them with the phone‘s camera.
M. Jahn et al., The Energy Aware Smart Home, In FutureTech, pages 1–8, 2010.
44

The WoT in Smart Homes University of Cyprus

WS-* integration in a smart home.
Big Web services are employed for interoperability of home appliances.
WS-* inappropriate for resource-constrained devices in terms of
response times and energy performance.

Marco Aiello. The role of web services at home. In IEEE Web Service-based Systems and
Applications (WEBSA), page 164, 2006. 45


The Smart Home meets the Web of Things.

• Reuse of Web principles in a resource-oriented style.
• Integration of household appliances to the Web.
• An application framework offers support for multiple
home residents concurrently.
• A reliable and efficient smart home environment.
• Flexible applications on top of heterogeneous
embedded devices, can be built with minimum effort,
by following the REST paradigm.

Andreas Kamilaris, Vlad Trifa, and Andreas Pitsillides. The Smart Home meets the Web of
Things. International Journal of Ad Hoc and Ubiquitous Computing (IJAHUC), Special issue on
The Smart Digital Home, 7(3):145-154, April, 2011.
46


The Smart Home meets the Web of Things.

function check {
if [ $? -le 20 ] ; then
curl -d "color=GREEN" -X POST localhost:8080/sensors/sensor5/Light/
fi
}
curl -s -X GET localhost:8080/sensors/sensor8/Temperature/ $1
check;

47

The WoT in Energy-aware Smart Homes University of Cyprus

• Deployment of a WSN of smart power outlets called Ploggs.
• IPv6-enabled Telosb sensor devices by means of blip (6LoWPAN
implementation for the TinyOS sensors operating system).

48


• All interactions with embedded devices are done via standard
HTTP requests.
49


• Device-level energy consumption information.
• Electricity comparison with previous days, weeks, months, years.
• Association of electricity data with costs.

50


function check {
if [ $? -le 20 ] ; then
curl -d "status=OFF" -X PUT [serverAddress]/AirConditioner/Switch/
fi
}
curl -s -X GET [serverAddress]/Kitchen/Temperature/ $1
check;

• Combine household electrical appliances with Web content.
• Web practices for developing smart, energy-efficient rules.
51


• A physical mashup editor for the
smart home.
• Creation of physical mashups in
only a few clicks.

52


• Performance comparable to non-IPv6 implementations.
• Satisfactory response times.
• Acceptable energy consumption.

53

The WoT in Social Networking University of Cyprus

Social Networking of the Smart Home.
• Sharing household appliances.

Andreas Kamilaris and Andreas Pitsillides, Social Networking of the Smart Home, in 21st Annual
IEEE International Symposium on Personal,Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications (PIMRC
2010), Istanbul, Turkey, September 2010. 54

The WoT in competitions for energy efficiency
in local neighborhoods University of Cyprus

A small case study in two blocks of flats, creating a social competition
among the flats, to award those with the best energy management.

Andreas Kamilaris, Giannis Kitromilides and Andreas Pitsillides. Energy Conservation through
Social Competitions in Blocks of Flats. In Proc. of the 1st International Conference on Smart
Grids and Green IT Systems (SMARTGREENS), Porto, Portugal, April 2012. 55

The WoT in competitions for energy efficiency
in local neighborhoods University of Cyprus

Suburban Block of Flats Urban Block of Flats

Comparing with previous months, 11.90% average reduction of
energy in the suburban case and 27.74% for the urban block.
56

The WoT in country-scale comparisons of
domestic electrical consumption University of Cyprus

SocialElectricity is a Facebook application that allows people to compare
their electricity footprint with their friends and their street/neighborhood/city.

Andreas Kamilaris, Diomidis Papadiomidous and Andreas Pitsillides. Lessons Learned from Online
Social Networking of Physical Things. In Proc. of the Sixth International Conference on Broadband and
Wireless Computing, Communication and Applications (BWCCA), Barcelona, Spain, October 2011. 57

The WoT in Logistics University of Cyprus

Electronic Product Code Information Services (EPCIS) is an open
public standard used to track the progress of objects as they move
through the supply chain, using RFID.
• Building a Web-enabled EPCIS.

D. Guinard, M. Müller, Jacques Pasquier, Giving RFID a REST: Building a Web-Enabled
EPCIS, Proceedings of the Internet of Things 2010 International Conference (IoT 2010),
November 2010, Tokyo, Japan. 58

The WoT at the Urban Environment University of Cyprus

• Community-based, real-time (indirect) sensor sharing.
• Location-based discovery of sensors through the Web.
• Web-enabled physical devices have the potential to
become first-class citizens in the digital cities of the
future.
Andreas Kamilaris, Nicolas Iannarilli, Vlad Trifa, and Andreas Pitsillides. Bridging the Mobile
Web and the Web of Things in Urban Environments. In Urban Internet of Things Workshop, at
IOT 2010, November 2010. 59

The WoT at the Urban Environment University of Cyprus

Urban Mashups defined as opportunistic physical mashups,
validated when the local environmental conditions support the
pervasive services, defined in the mashups.

Advanced automatic knowledge inference in the urban
environment about environmental services. 60

The WoT in the Smart Grid University of Cyprus

• Link features of the smart grid (demand response, real-
time tariff changes etc.) to energy-aware smart homes.
• Do the washing when the tariff is low!
Andreas Kamilaris and Andreas Pitsillides. Exploiting Demand Response in Web-based Energy-aware
Smart Homes. In Proc. of the first International Conference on Smart Grids, Green Communications
and IT Energy-aware Technologies (Energy 2011), Venice, Italy, May 2011. 61


Exploiting Demand Response in energy-aware smart homes
• Web-based notification of tariff changes in real-time.

• Identification of schedulable home appliances.
• Schedule electricity-related tasks for future execution.
• Perform the ironing when the tariff falls 8%.
• Define the duration of each task, max amount of waiting time etc.
62


Using Load Shedding for avoiding outages

63

Concluding Remarks University of Cyprus

• A number of interesting IOT applications
platforms have been developed

• A unified platform which supports the whole
IoT/WoT spectrum is still missing…
65


• Potential applications are out there
• Technology is maturing
• Many challenges still exist, but solutions and
some early deployments are appearing
• An open unified platform is missing, but active
research in that direction
• Generally, it is an active research field... with
many potential benefits, and perhaps potential
dangers.

66


With so much to gain, what is there to lose?

• Privacy (potentially)
• Risk of abuse by a ‗malevolent‘ government or IT company
• ‗compared with some smart systems, the ubiquitous telescreen monitoring device in
George Orwell‘s novel ―1984‖ seems a plaything. The book‘s hero, Winston Smith,
would soon have a much harder time finding a corner in his room to hide from big
brother.‘
• Fairness between those with access to smart systems,
which can be better informed than those without, giving
them an unfair advantage (or perhaps not, due to the clutter of
information?!).
• Information clutter (e.g. in Germany this year they threw out 86 million RFIDs—
projected to grow to 23 billion RFIDs and sensors by 2020)
• ... And many more ... Brother.

http://www.economist.com/node/17388368?story_id=17388368 67

Future Challenges University of Cyprus

• An open unified platform for the IoT/WoT
• Application of the WoT in more domains: Widespread real-
life experiences of the WoT are still missing
• The Web as a complete practice for embedded computing
• Security and privacy in the WoT
• Wide acceptance, deployment, scaling, large scale
adoption
• Semantics for WoT
• Web 3.0 and a real pervasive world of things

69


A need for a global, real-time, ubiquitous discovery of sensor
devices and environmental services.
• Harness existing DNS infrastructure

Andreas Kamilaris and Andreas Pitsillides. Using DNS for Global Discovery of Environmental
Services. In Proc. of the 8th International Conference on Web Information Systems and
Technologies (WEBIST), Porto, Portugal, April 2012. 70


EVRYTHNG

• Blending physical things with online social networking.
• Every object in the world with its own unique identity.
Evrythng Company. Online at: http://evrythng.com/ 71


What about the Internet of Nanothings?!!!

• Nanotechnology promises new solutions for many
applications in the biomedical, industrial and military
fields as well as in consumer and industrial goods.
• interconnection of nanoscale devices with existing
communication networks and ultimately the Internet
defines a new networking paradigm that is further
referred to as the Internet of Nanothings.

72

Demonstration University of Cyprus

SocialElectricity Facebook Application

SocialElectricity Facebook application. Online at: http://apps.facebook.com/socialelectricity/ 73

Thanks for your attention!
Contact Details: Andreas Pitsillides
(Email: Andreas.Pitsillides@ucy.ac.cy)

Andreas Kamilaris
(Email: akamil01@cs.ucy.ac.cy )

NetRL Group: http://www.NetRL.cs.ucy.ac.cy/
74

REST- Representational State Transfer University of Cyprus

• provides Web services modelled as resources, identified by
Unique Resource Identifiers (URI).
• resources can only be manipulated by the methods specified
in the HTTP standard (e.g. GET, PUT, POST, DELETE),
under a uniform interface.
• promotes the practice of Resource Oriented Architectures
(ROA), in order to provide and connect together services on
the Web.
• guarantees interoperability, loose-coupling and a smooth
transition from the Web to home environments.

75

REST vs WS-* University of Cyprus

• Web services tend to fall into one of two camps:
• Big Web services (WS-*) and RESTful Web services.

• WS-* are a set of complex standards and specifications for
enterprise application integration.

• We believe that RESTful Web services are more appropriate
for
• resource-constrained, ad hoc environments due to their
simplicity and flexibility.

76

Service discovery and description (an aside) University of Cyprus

Since we envision Web-enablement of embedded devices, we need to
follow Web-based approaches also for discovering these devices and
what they can offer.

Search engine /
Registry
Discover Publish
/subscribe (WADL)
(http)

Device Service Device Service
Requestor Provider
Interact
(http)

Enterprise computing parallelism for the real-world
77

The Web of Things: Enabling the Physical World to the Web

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