Читать книгу The Smart Cyber Ecosystem for Sustainable Development - Группа авторов - Страница 20

In IoT, many heterogeneous devices, protocols, operating systems have to work together to fulfill objectives. This heterogeneity is one of the major concerns when we perform communication in the world of IoT as it requires not only anytime, anywhere but also anything enabled to communicate. “Interoperability” is a characteristic of a product or system whose interfaces are completely understood to work with other products or systems without any limitations. Interoperability is must when we would like to communicate in the era of IoT that contains heterogeneous devices [19]. So, by maintaining interoperability in the IoT network, we can have exchange of data and service in a seamless manner. In this seamless exchange of data and service, many elements are involved and perform the communication such as physical objects can communicate with other physical objects.

As per the overall goal of IoT, anytime anywhere anything (device) can be communicated with other devices, i.e., can do Device-to-Device (D2D) communication. More than these types of communication, others such as Device-to-Machine (D2M) communication, M2M communication should also be performed seamlessly in the IoT network. Hence, in this situation, the IoT network has to deal with many types of heterogeneity such as heterogeneity of different wired and wireless communication protocols. Moreover, different programming languages are used for different platforms as well as different hardwares that also vary different standards and support different languages and communication protocols. So, if we would like to perform seamless communication between such corel, heterogeneous connected components, protocols, languages, operating systems, databases, and hardwares, then interoperability among them is a must.

There are basically two types of Interoperability such as User Interoperability and Device Interoperability. User Interoperability is an interoperability problem between user and device(s) and Device Interoperability is an interoperability problem between two different devices. User interoperability problems occur when remotely located users would like to communicate with other device(s) whose product id may be written in different language, there may be differences in user syntaxes, differences in user semantics, as well as differences in user specification for those devices. So, all these types of complex veracity leads to create a simple IoT problem into a complex one that falls under the problem of interoperability.

To resolve such user syntax interoperability problems worldwide, there are different solutions that provide unique device identification addresses to devices such as Electronic Product Codes (EPC), Universal Product Code (UPC), Uniform Resource Locator (URL), and IP addresses IPv6. For resolving syntactic interoperability problems there are different approaches such as Open standard protocol (IEEE 802.15.4, IEEE 802.15.1, and Wireless HART), Closed standard protocol (Z-Wave), Service Oriented Computing (SOC), and web services. But all these approaches have the problem of heterogeneity and, therefore, incompatible with each other to perform communication. So, we have certain middleware technologies such as Universal Middleware Bridge (UMB) that resolve such devices interoperability problems that have been generated due to heterogeneity amongst them. Thus, in this topic we have discussed IoT which is surrounded by heterogeneity problems, which can be resolved using interoperability features. The next topic explains about the programming technologies concerned with IoT.