Browsing Architecture with Presentation Metadata for the Internet of Things

To realize the Internet of Things (IoT), an important step would be to allow things and information about them to be accessible in an easy way and a platform-independent manner. As World Wide Web (WWW, Web) shows explosive growth over the last decade, the web is the most popular and familiar user interface to acquire knowledge about everyday life. In this respect, web browsing through standard protocols like HTTP over TCP could be a promising approach to access things and to collect things' information. In future, IP-based wireless sensor networks (IP-WSNs) are expected to be integrated into the IoT. However, due to the characteristics of IP-WSN such as resource limited and low data-rate, the challenges that we confronted are 1) how to make clients access IP-WSNs as if they use regular web browsers with rich presentation and acceptable response time and 2) how to embed the standard web in such resource-constrained sensor nodes. In this paper, to address these challenges, we introduce a new browsing architecture, which enables the exploration of the IP-WSNs through a conventional web browser and the navigation with rich user interfaces. We also design lightweight web protocols, lwHTTP and lwTCP, with header compression in order for HTTP and TCP to run on the resource-constrained IP-WSNs. To show the feasibility, we implement the proposed architecture in SNAIL (Sensor Networks for an All-IP world), our IP-WSN platform, and we evaluate the performance of proposed browsing architecture.