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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:

Copper JavaScript CoAP implementation Copper JavaScript CoAP implementation

See also the following related items:

Selected Publications

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

Related Student Projects

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

TypeTitleStudentSupervisorSemester
M The Web of Things for Automation Controllers Ganesh RamanathanMatthias KovatschFS 16
L The Copper (Cu) CoAP user-agent for Chrome Arthur Kurath,
Christian Hagedorn
Matthias KovatschFS 16
M Hypermedia Controls for the Internet of Things Yassin N. HassanMatthias KovatschHS 15
L Scalability Evaluation of IoT Cloud Services Marcin Dziezyc,
(Matthias Kovatsch)
Matthias KovatschFS 15
L A Practical Approach to Web Semantics for M2M Communication Yassin Hassan,
(Matthias Kovatsch)
Matthias Kovatsch,
Simon Mayer
HS 14
M Scalability for IoT Cloud Services Martin LanterMatthias KovatschFS 13
B Enriching IoT Cloud Platforms with CoAP Adrian KündigMatthias KovatschFS 13
M Securing the Constrained Application Protocol Stefan JuckerMatthias KovatschFS 12
M A Smart City Infrastructure Francesco CorazzaMatthias KovatschFS 12
M Opportunistic Sensing for Domestic Smart Energy Systems Nico EigenmannMatthias KovatschFS 12
B Extending the eMeter Framework with CoAP Stefan WilliMatthias KovatschFS 12
B Application Kernels for Smart Home Environments Gianluca VinzensMatthias KovatschFS 12
B The Networked Alarm Clock David IttenMatthias KovatschHS 11
B Actinium: An App Server for the Smart Home Martin LanterMatthias KovatschHS 11
L Californium: A CoAP Framework in Java Dominique Im Obersteg,
Daniel Pauli
Matthias KovatschFS 11
L Prototyping Smart Appliances Christof Baumann,
Nico Eigenmann
Matthias KovatschFS 11
ETH ZurichDistributed Systems Group
Last updated January 1 1970 01:00:00 AM MET ko