Towards industrial Internet of Things: An efficient and interoperable communication framework

Interoperability between shop floor devices and upper layer systems is a key challenge for enabling Internet of Things in industrial applications. Standardized protocols such as IPv6, CoAP, and XML can be used to address this issue. Widely used XML-based technologies such as SenML, EEML, OPC-UA as well as others rely on XML to be able to support a wide range of sensor and actuator applications. However, this approach results in high communication overhead due to the verbose nature of plain text messages encoded in XML. When devices are communicating using 6LoWPAN over IEEE 802.15.4, it is important to keep the messages small enough to fit into one MAC-layer frame to avoid fragmentation and hence conserving bandwidth and transmission energy. One possible solution is to integrate differential binary delta-encoding with a service-based framework based on CoAP, SenML and EXI. The proposed efficient communication approach for service-based architecture can compress a series of events up to 90-95%. The proposed framework is a holistic approach for enabling distributed monitoring and control applications and a move towards realizing the vision of Services of Things.