Restful Framework for Collaborative Internet of Things based on IEC 61850

Abstract: 

Smart environments where envisioned by Mark Weiser in
1991 when he formulated the Ubiquitous Computing paradigm,
defining them as physical locations populated by devices,
highly integrated in the environment, with identification,
sensing and actuation capabilities. Ambient Intelligence (AmI)
was the first evolution of this paradigm, with a user-centric view
of the ubiquitous services. Nowadays, Internet of Things (IoT) is
the next evolution of these two concepts, expanding the scope
of the individual devices, represented as things, from a local
environment to the Internet as global network.
For implementing these scenarios, one of the biggest
challenges in this research area is to establish automatic
mechanisms to compose, in a dynamic way, services on
demand. The objective of the composition is to satisfy global
needs combining the existing services. This thesis proposes a
collaborative architecture among the things in the IoT domain.
SOAP/XML based Web Services are suitable for IoT
scenarios where these services can be published, discovered
and invoked dynamically. Alternatively, REpresentational
State Transfer (REST) has gained much attention from
the community and is considered as a lighter and cleaner
technology for communication in the Internet. Despite such
benefits of REST, the dynamic discovery and eventing of
RESTful services are yet considered a major hurdle to get the
full potential of REST based approaches. This thesis addresses
this issue, by providing a RESTful discovery and eventing
specification.
Another aspect addressed by this thesis is the application
level organization of the distributed things. Electrical power
systems and substations are one of the most representative domains
of networked individual things. The most prominent and
adopted solution for standardizing the information models in
these domain is the International Electrotechnical Commission
(IEC) 61850 standard. However, the communication protocols
defined by the standard are not completely adequate for IoT.
Thus, this thesis elaborates on the suitability of IEC 61850
information models for IoT applications proposing a RESTful
mapping of the abstract services.
Finally, dependability related issues are addressed when
considering the application of IoT architectures in critical
domains such as health care or safety critical systems.
This thesis analyzes the communication aspects from various
message transfer perspectives. The cornerstone of the proposed
approach is the consideration of a dependable RESTful
communication throughout the message trail in the IoT
environment.