The Web of Things: Interconnecting Devices with High Usability and Performance

Published 1 January 2009

Simon Duquennoy, Gilles Grimaud, Jean-Jacques Vandewalle

DOI10.1109/icess.2009.13

Citations131

TL;DR

It is shown that Web protocols and technologies are good candidates to design the Internet of Things, and a new way to design embedded Web servers is proposed, using a dedicated TCP/IP stack and numerous cross-layer off-line pre-calculation.

Abstract

In this paper, we show that Web protocols and technologies are good candidates to design the Internet of things. This approach allows anyone to access embedded devices through a Web application, via a standard Web browser. This Web of things requires to embed Web servers in hardware-constrained devices. We first analyze the traffics embedded Web servers have to handle. Starting from this analysis, we propose a new way to design embedded Web servers, using a dedicated TCP/IP stack and numerous cross-layer off-line pre-calculation (where information are shared between IP, TCP, HTTP and the Web application). We finally present a prototype - named Smews - as a proof of concept of our proposals. It has been embedded in tiny devices (smart cards, sensors and other embedded devices), with a requirement of only 200~bytes of RAM and 7~kilo-bytes of code. We show that it is significantly faster than other state of the art solutions. We made Smews source code publicly available under an open-source license.

Keywords

Computer Science

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