Managing Device and Platform Heterogeneity through the Web of Things

The chaotic growth of the IoT determined a fragmented landscape with a huge number of devices, technologies, and platforms available on the market, and consequential issues of interoperability on many system deployments. The Web of Things (WoT) architecture recently proposed by the W3C consortium constitutes a novel solution to enable interoperability across IoT Platforms and application domains. At the same time, in order to see an effective improvement, a wide adoption of the W3C WoT solutions from the academic and industrial communities is required; this translates into the need of accurate and complete support tools to ease the deployment of W3C WoT applications, as well as reference guidelines about how to enable the WoT on top of existing IoT scenarios and how to deploy WoT scenarios from scratch. In this thesis, we bring three main contributions for filling such gap: (1) we introduce the WoT Store, a novel platform for managing and easing the deployment of Things and applications on the W3C WoT, and additional strategies for bringing old legacy IoT systems into the WoT. The WoT Store allows the dynamic discovery of the resources available in the environment, i.e. the Things, and to interact with each of them through a dashboard by visualizing their properties, executing commands, or observing the notifications produced. (2) We map three different IoT scenarios to WoT scenarios: a generic heterogeneous environmental monitoring scenario, a structural health monitoring scenario and an Industry4.0 scenario. (3) We make proposals to improve both the W3C standard and the node-wot software stack design: in the first case, new vocabularies are needed in order to handle particular protocols employed in industrial scenarios, while in the second case we present some contributions required for the dynamic instantiation and the migration of Web Things and WoT services in a cloud-to-edge continuum environment.