Self-Description and Protocol Conversion for a Web of Things

Many enterprise applications can benefit from the use of wireless sensors, for example for monitoring location and state of goods. While modern backend IT systems use elaborate Service Oriented Architectures based on Web Services, the resource constraints of sensor nodes require highly optimized embedded programming and proprietary networking protocols. This paper aims at bridging this gap by extending Web Service Oriented Architectures to wireless sensors in a standard compliant way while not exceeding the constrained resources of sensor nodes - thus contributing to the formation of a Web of Things. In particular, we enable self-description of embedded Web services through efficient compression of WSDL documents, we support discovery of embedded Web services by means of an efficient embedded discovery protocol, and we enable backend IT systems to invoke embedded Web services on sensor nodes and vice versa by providing an open framework for protocol conversion. We implement our proposal to obtain key performance figures.