ETH Zurich : Computer Science : Pervasive Computing : Distributed Systems : Research : Embedded Web Resources

Communicating and Interacting with Embedded Web Resources

A Research Project of the Distributed Systems Group

With the standardization of Internet technology for constrained networked embedded devices, a vision of pervasive computing is becoming reality: Everyday objects are getting "smart" through sensing, actuation, and computing power and interconnected in an Internet of Things. This project is devoted to design a Web-like application layer for the most resource-constrained devices and to make programming of Internet of Things applications significantly easier.

The key incentives for the proposed architecture are full Web integration, intuitive APIs, decoupling of infrastructure and applications, and end-user programming. These can be achieved by separating the application logic from the device firmware. The thin server architecture—analog to the thin client, which is only equipped with the necessary interfaces to interact with the user—relieves embedded servers from the burden of application logic and rather utilizes them as wrappers for the sensors and actuators of the smart objects.

We study this system architecture by means of a prototypical implementation. The low-end devices are connected to the Internet using the 6LoWPAN protocol, an adaption layer for normal IPv6 to be used over low-power communication links. On top, we use the leight-weight Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP), a HTTP-like protocol for machine-to-machine communication, which is currently drafted by the IETF. In this course, we published three different open-source implementations:

• CoAP Java implementation for the back-end,
• CoAP C implementation for Contiki to realize thin servers, and
• CoAP JavaScript implementation for user-friendly interaction with smart objects.

See also the following related items:

• Internet of Things (topic)
• Web of Things (topic)

Selected Publications

See the Publications of the Distributed Systems Group page for a full listing of our publications.

• Matthias Kovatsch, Martin Lanter, Zach Shelby
  Californium: Scalable Cloud Services for the Internet of Things with CoAP.
  Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on the Internet of Things (IoT 2014). Cambridge, MA, USA, October 2014
  Abstract, BibTeX, Paper (.pdf)
  Best paper
  
  
• Matthias Kovatsch
  CoAP for the Web of Things: From Tiny Resource-constrained Devices to the Web Browser.
  Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on the Web of Things (WoT 2013). Zurich, Switzerland, September 2013
  Abstract, BibTeX, Paper (.pdf)
  Best paper
  
  
• Matthias Kovatsch, Martin Lanter, Simon Duquennoy
  Actinium: A RESTful Runtime Container for Scriptable Internet of Things Applications.
  Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on the Internet of Things (IoT 2012). pp. 135--142, Wuxi, China, October 2012
  Abstract, BibTeX, Paper (.pdf)
  
  
• Matthias Kovatsch, Simon Mayer, Benedikt Ostermaier
  Moving Application Logic from the Firmware to the Cloud: Towards the Thin Server Architecture for the Internet of Things.
  Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Innovative Mobile and Internet Services in Ubiquitous Computing (IMIS 2012). Palermo, Italy, July 2012
  Abstract, BibTeX, Paper (.pdf)
  
  
• Matthias Kovatsch, Simon Duquennoy, Adam Dunkels
  A Low-Power CoAP for Contiki.
  Proceedings of the 8th IEEE International Conference on Mobile Ad-hoc and Sensor Systems (MASS 2011). Valencia, Spain, October 2011
  Abstract, BibTeX, Paper (.pdf)
  
  
• Matthias Kovatsch
  Demo Abstract: Human–CoAP Interaction with Copper.
  Proceedings of the 7th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems (DCOSS 2011). Barcelona, Spain, June 2011
  Abstract, BibTeX, Paper (.pdf)
  
  

Related Student Projects

The following table lists corresponding student projects in our group. Note that some descriptions will be in German.