Gateways for the Internet of Things: An old problem revisited

An early paper in network interconnection outlined the choices between adoption and adaption of protocol structures at different levels of the early Internet. This paper revisits that theme in the light of the many advances of the last three decades, and the emergence of the Internet of Things. We maintain that there are close parallels between the variety of incompatible networks which were in vogue in the early days of the Internet and the current situation with domain-specific sensor and actuator systems in the Internet of Things. We point out that there is now much more agreement on the approach to basic services, and a more universal approach to adaption. While universal adoption of common technologies is still far distant, there has been a broad consensus on the use of the Internet and web services for the access to such systems. Because of the standardization in some of the levels of web services, particularly in the context of IPv6, a consistent architecture is defined and examples of possible implementations given.