oBIX

Abstract: Building automation is a vital part of many use cases related to energy efficiency and smart living in the context of smart cities. State of the art building automation systems like KNX, BACnet or ZigBee are based on control networks mainly used for local control scenarios using non-IP communications. This paper presents an integration approach for building automation systems using an IPv6 enabled service-oriented architecture allowing interconnecting heterogeneous technologies into a large-scale distributed control system. Details on the concept, a proof of concept implementation and performance evaluation results of a multi-protocol gateway are presented, offering a per-device IPv6 interface using a novel CoAP/EXI protocol binding for oBIX. The integration approach aims at providing a homogeneous integration layer that can be used to build advanced control scenarios that might arise in the context of smart cities.

Abstract: In future buildings, all devices will be connected directly to the Internet, surrounding people with a Web of Things. That will bring the amazing possibility to control building facilities from any device with Internet access (PC, mobile phone, etc.). However, while it is already technically possible to connect devices directly to IP networks, most of home and building automation systems still use non-IP field level communication protocols. In this paper we describe an integration platform, which is an intermediate step between future IP based systems and available legacy equipment. The platform uses Web services technology for connecting devices to a stand-alone server. This approach makes the system flexible and independent from underlying platform and communication protocols. Conducted measurements with our oBIX based implementation show that our system model is efficient and can be deployed on cheap embedded devices with limited resources for computing.

Abstract: Electronic Product Code Information System (EPCIS) has been a well-known information system for tracking and monitoring physical objects' life-cycle using RFID technology. However, in the Internet of Things (IoT) context, physical objects are supposed to be equipped with computing and sensing capability. Thus, people are interested not only in objects' life-cycle but also their contextual data. This emerging issue poses a new functional requirement on the traditional EPCIS such that, objects' contextual data should also be managed along with their life-cycle. Meanwhile, one of the most important IoT application lays in Building Automation Systems where smart devices are connected and automated without human intervention. These devices usually generate a large volume of data in a daily basis and thus, designing a proper data warehousing for this use case becomes a challenge. This paper aims at adding a data capturing interface to the traditional EPCIS so that it can support objects' data storage and retrieval, thus seamlessly adds significant support for Building Automation Systems application. The extended system, which is called Smart Thing Information System (STIS), exploits the oBIX standard and CoAP protocol to capture the data send from the smart devices and provides an additional lightweight query interface also based on CoAP. The system's applicability has been verified through a practical global-wide test bed between Korea and Austria.

Abstract: Recent research and standardization in the domain of the Internet of Things aims at providing IPv6 and Web services on the most constrained devices. The constrained application protocol (CoAP) allows the deployment of RESTful Web services on limited devices by offering a protocol similar to HTTP that uses UDP as transport layer instead of TCP. This enables more efficient communication if non-reliable, asynchronous or group communication is required. Existing and mature home and building automation technologies like KNX, BACnet or ZigBee are based on non-IP communication and define a complete custom protocol stack. State of the art integration approaches usually offer a centralized Web service interface based on oBIX, OPC UA or BACnet/WS based on SOAP or RESTful Web services. This paper presents the concept of a gateway that allows the integration of building automation systems into constrained RESTful environments by an IPv6 per-device interface based on oBIX using a novel constrained application protocol binding with efficient XML interchange message encoding. This integration approach provides a service-oriented architecture with uniform interfaces for control scenarios that span heterogeneous technologies. The evaluation results show the efficiency of novel protocol bindings compared to state of the art protocol bindings and message encodings. Performance evaluation results prove that even interactive user control scenarios can be based on these Web service interfaces.