Enacting Emergent Configurations in the IoT through Domain Objects

The Internet of Things (IoT) pervades more and more aspects of our lives and often involves many types of smart connected objects and devices. User’s IoT environment changes dynamically, e.g., due to the mobility of the user and devices. Users can fully benefit from the IoT only when they can effortlessly interact with it. To accomplish this in a dynamic and heterogenous environment, we make use of Emergent Configurations (ECs), which consist of a set of things that connect and cooperate temporarily through their functionalities, applications, and services, to achieve a user goal. In this paper, we: (i) present the IoT-FED architectural approach to enable the automated formation and enactment of ECs. IoT-FED exploits heterogeneous and independently developed things, IoT services, and applications which are modeled as Domain Objects (DOs), a service-based formalism. Additionally, we (ii) discuss the prototype we developed and the experiments run in our IoT lab, for validation purposes.