Evaluation of IoTivity: A Middleware Architecture for the Internet of Things

Sammanfattning: Today the Internet of Things (IoT) lacks universal standards for communication and interaction between devices. There is a wide collection of diverse software architectures for IoT applications on the market, where smart devices from different manufacturers are often unable to interact with each other. A standards organization within IoT gaining recognition is the Open Connectivity Foundation (OCF), an industry group delivering an IoT software framework specification and a product certification program. Open Connectivity Foundation (OCF) is funding an open source reference implementation of the specification called IoTivity, which runs as middleware intended to be portable to all operating systems and connectivity platforms. The goal of the OCF is to enable interoperability between IoT devices regardless of manufacturer, operating system, chipset or physical transport. Through a literature review, the key functional and non-functional requirements for IoT middleware architectures were found. Functionality requirements identified were data management, resource management, resource discovery, and contextawareness. The quality attributes were found to be interoperability, adaptability, scalability, security, and real-time behavior.In this thesis project, IoTivity was evaluated with respect to these requirements with the scenario-based Method for Evaluating Middleware Architectures (MEMS). As a part of MEMS, a case study of implementing a building management system (BMS) with IoTivity was conducted. Results showed that, within the framework of the case study, IoTivity complied with three out of four functional requirements, and three out of five quality requirements identified for IoT middleware architectures. One of the quality requirements, security, was not evaluated in this study.