Noname manuscript No.

(will be inserted by the editor)

Mobile Digcovery: Discovering and Interacting with the World

through the Internet of Things
Antonio J. Jara · Pablo Lopez · David Fernandez · Jose F. Castillo ·
Miguel A. Zamora · Antonio F. Skarmeta

Received: date / Accepted: date

Abstract The application of Internet-enabled devices 1 Introduction

in the real world for the development of Smart Cities,
environmental monitoring, bus tracking and parking, The future is unpredictable, but the present is being
are requiring scalability, extensibility, and integration of powered by a new generation of solutions and services
emerging resources in order to reach a suitable ecosys- based on a higher context awareness through geo-location
tem for data acquisition and interaction with the cit- and identification technologies.
izens. Internet of Things needs to offer efficient sup- These capabilities are found in the multiple applica-
port for global communications and access to the ser- tions developed for platforms such as tables and smart-
vices and information. It needs to enable a homoge- phones. The way that people interact with the world
neous and seamless machine to machine (M2M) com- has changed, senses have been extended with the new
munication in the different solutions and use cases. This generation of technologies, devices and networks. These
work presents a homogeneous and suitable mechanism new senses are powered by a world of ubiquitous com-
for the global resource discovery, devices access for the puting applications which makes feasible provide ser-
deployed smart objects in the different scenarios, sen- vices and deliver information in any place around the
sors and devices from the end users (participative sens- world [1], with just checking or clicking on their smart-
ing). The integration of legacy and already available phone screens. This new generation of services and in-
sensors from smart buildings and smart objects is pre- teraction with the world through the smartphone have
sented. For this purpose, a resolution infrastructure called built the already called ”smartphone generation” [2].
”digcovery” is defined for maximizing efficiency and Smartphone generation is more used to the con-
sustainability of deployments. Digcovery architecture nected world, for this new generation is natural to be
offers the framework to allow the users to register/in- connected to any person, in anytime, from anywhere,
clude their own sensors into a common infrastructure, it is the potential of the social networks, but it is not
and access/discover the available resources through mo- limited to people. They also want to be able to mon-
bile digcovery. Mobile digcovery exploits through its itor and control every ”thing” in their lives, anytime
ElasticSearch Engine the context-awareness, geo-location from anywhere. This new connected world is stimulat-
and identification technologies available in mobile plat- ing consumer interest for internet-connected products
forms such as smartphones to discover, interact and ac- [2]. Therefore, for this new generation making everyday
cess to the resources. objects smart by endowing them with computing and
communication capabilities as well as with sensors and
Keywords Internet of Things · Discovery · Gover- actuators, is the long-standing vision of the ubiquitous
nance · Context Awareness · Identification computing. The idea of connect things to the Internet
stem from the desire to remotely monitor and control
Antonio J. Jara · Pablo Lopez · David Fernandez · Jose F.
Castillo · Miguel A. Zamora · Antonio F. Skarmeta
them is coming from the commences of Internet, such as
Clinical Technology Lab, Computer Science Fac., University the vending machine serving cold beverages connected
of Murcia, Spain E-mail: {jara, p.lopezmartinez, david.f.r, to the Internet in the 1970s at the School of Computer
josefelix.castillo, mzamora, skarmeta}@um.es Science in the Carnegie Mellon University [3].
2 Antonio J. Jara et al.

Nowadays, this vision of a world with everything challenge. The challenges are coming as a consequence
connected is not only limited to specific devices or anec- of this increase of the number of devices in terms of
dotic machines. Internet is being extended to connect scalability, governance, security, and discoverability.
all objects and devices that surround us, this is the so- Since, the users are part of these smart cities, it
called Internet of things (IoT) [4]. The objective of IoT needs to be solved how to carry out a suitable user in-
is to allow systems total control and access to other sys- teraction, collection of the information and active par-
tems, which result in the provision of ubiquitous com- ticipation. These are yet open questions that needs to
munication and computing facility. Hence a new gen- be answered. This work is focused on the discoverability
eration of smart and small devices, context awareness of devices based on context-awareness and geo-location.
services and applications can be defined. First, it has been required to build a scalable architec-
IoT is being applied in a wide number of areas such ture to support an extensible number of devices, do-
as home automation, advanced metering, smart grid, mains and the integration of heterogeneous technologies
lighting, traffic management and environment monitor- including RFID, sensor networks, NFC, Bluetooth, Zig-
ing. All these application areas are being now aggre- bee, WiFi and legacy technologies. Second, it has been
gated into the concept of Smart Cities. built an application to interact with the world through
Consequently, Smart Cities are being composed of a wide-area capable devices and applications to discover
large and heterogeneous number of devices, sensors, and services anywhere in the world. Finally, it is presented
actuators. This aggregation is allowing to offer a higher the search engine based on a elastic approach to make
level solutions based on context-awareness through, on suitable the integration of distributed resources repos-
the one hand, track and location of buses, ambulances, itories and offer support for the discovery, i.e. query,
flows of people, and on the other hand, smart sensing look-up and filtering, of resources based on context-
of the different parameters such as traffic, parking, and awareness, resource types and geo-location criteria.
environmental conditions (temperature, humidity, and Service discoverability is a design principle, applied
luminosity). within the service-orientation design paradigm, which
This higher level solutions are allowing a smart actu- emphasizes making services discoverable by adding in-
ation through light intensity regulators, parking space terpretable meta-data to increase service reuse and de-
detectors, audio-visual displays for real-time and dy- crease the chance of developing services that overlap in
namic traffic management. They are only some of ex- function. By making services easily discoverable, this
amples of what is arriving with the conception of the design principle indirectly makes services more interop-
Smart Cities. erable
Smart Cities is the major advance and conception of This work presents the mobile digcovery architec-
the communications evolution and ubiquitous comput- ture to enable consumers to monitor and control their
ing. The number and diversity of sensors and devices ”things” (products) from web browsers and smartphones.
deployed is growing tremendously thanks to their ca- Services and resources discovery has been discussed in
pacity to offer low cost air-interfaces which allow easy the literature [5], but it has not been yet proposed an
and quick deployment. It is also growing because their approach for the integration of the different resources
suitability to support an extended range of solutions, available in the Internet of Things ecosystems such as
and the infrastructure capacity to provide Internet ac- Smart Cities, and offer over this suitable interaction
cess to these networks. Thereby, Internet of things is be- through mobile platforms powered with a elastic and
coming ubiquitous to all environments and users, and scalable search engine, such as the presented in the Sec-
accessible for the sensors with the evolution of tech- tion 5, to make feasible and suitable the discovery of
nologies such as IPv6 Low Power Wireless Personal heterogeneous and distributed resources.
Area Networks (6LoWPAN). There has been a tremen- Digcovery architecture is presented in the Section 2,
dous increase in Internet use, from 360 million users in this offers the infrastructure to carry out global discov-
2000 to 1.6 billion users and 4 billion mobile users with ery, integration of heterogeneous type of resources, and
over 570 million Internet-enabled hand-held devices has a elastic capabilities to make scalable the grow of the
been experienced. The number further goes up with the architecture, in addition to the look-up and browsing
introduction of the smart things to the internet. It is es- of devices, services and resources.
timated, in relation to the Internet of Things, the num- Digcovery is seen as a middleware or mash-up en-
ber of devices connected to the internet will connect 50 abler, since this integrated the devices, services and re-
to 100 billion [7] by 2020. sources from a wide range of legacy technologies, smart
Smart Cities can be considered the major testbed objects (IP-enabled) and Web Services. The Section 3.
of the Internet of Things, and consequently its major Digcovery architecture is funded over a collection of
Mobile Digcovery: Discovering and Interacting with the World through the Internet of Things 3

through DNS-queries extended with an elastic search

engine in order to make it scalable at the same time that
this offers a centralized point, called digcovery core, to
manage and discover them.
All the resources and services are mapped to a com-
mon ontology and description based on existing on-
tologies and profiles from the IP-enabled Smart Ob-
jects Alliance (IPSO) [11, 12], the Open Mobile Alliance
(OMA) [13], and compatible with DNS-SD types, in or-
der to reach a common semantic description accessible
through DNS.
This also presents how to interoperate with the dis-
covery architecture through other interfaces different
to DNS such as RESTful architecture with data struc-
tured in JSON format. It has been chosen JSON for the
interoperability with all the resources, since it has been
considered by the Working Groups from the IETF such
as the Constrained Resources (CoRE) Working Group,
Fig. 1 Digcovery Architecture. and the Constrained Management (COMA) Working
Group as the most suitable protocol to structure the
data for constrained resources, leaving as optional other
digrectories. Digrectory transform any kind of device, formats such as XML.
service and resource into a semantic interoperable for-
The look-up and queries (ElasticSearch) over dig-
mat that allows them to be accessed, combined, and
covery with context awareness, based on location or re-
exploited by any application. Digrectory can be also
source types, over the proposed ElasticSearch architec-
seen as a connector, following the idea of the Presto
ture, which offers organized and context-based queries
Mash-up Connectors [6].
over a heterogeneous and distributed source of resources
Mobile digcovery is the front-end of the digcovery
and services.
architecture, this offers the capabilities to interact with
the world through, on the one hand, the identifica- The first top module from the Figure 1 presents the
tion of the objects via technologies such as barcode, usage of the platform can be through DNS in order
quick response (QR) code, and RFID/NFC tags, and to exploit existing IP-based technologies, protocols and
on the other hand, the filtering of services based on geo- mechanisms.
location and context-awareness. The Section 4 presents The second top module is the Web-based platforms
the different mechanism for interaction offered by mo- to access and register resources through the RESTFul
bile digcovery, and the Section 5 presents the search architecture. Regarding the integration with the REST-
engine to filter by geo-location, context awareness, and Ful architecture, this also offers an interface based on
the resources types that the user has interests. CoAP [8], the Digcovery CoAP Service Protocol (DCSP)
Section 6 presents the other solutions defined for for CoAP-enabled devices. CoAP is the main result
bus tracking, mash-up, and interaction with the real- from the CoRE Working Group, this offer an integra-
world through the smart phone. Section 7 presents the tion of the RESTFul architecture for constrained de-
main differences and advantages from mobile digcovery vices with a overhead of only 4 bytes and a functionality
with respect to the state of the art, and finally Section optimized for the observation of resources [9], application-
8 concludes the paper. layer fragmentation [10], and mapping with the HTTP-
based RESTFul architecture.
The final module supported by the digcovery archi-
2 Architecture tecture is the mobile digcovery, which extends the archi-
tecture with the identification and location capabilities
Digcovery architecture is presented in the Figure 1. offered by the mobile platfoms such as smart phones
This presents how the different technologies involved through the integrated technologies, i.e. GPS and WiFi
in the Internet of Things ecosystem such as Smart Ob- (real time location systems) for Location, and RFID
jects, RFID tags, and legacy devices are integrated into and cameras (barcodes and QR codes) for identifica-
different digrectories. These digrectories are managed tion.
4 Antonio J. Jara et al.

the DNS Service Discovery semantic to describe ser-

vices and resources over DNS.
The black components are the other ones key build-
ings blocks from the digcovery architecture. The first
key component is the semantic description; it is a very
important issue in order to provide a powerful Open
Service Layer. For this purpose are several the actions
carried out in order EU projects such as SPITFIRE,
from the European Commission with the support of
events such as the Interoperability PlugFest in conjunc-
tion with Probe-IT project, and standardization groups
such as IPSO Alliance [11], ETSI and the recent re-
leased oneM2M and the Lightweight M2M (LWM2M)
from the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) [13].
The second key component is the Search Engine;
this is the key element of any discovery solution in or-
der to make it powerful. Digcovery has integrated Elas-
Fig. 2 Digcovery architecture components.
ticSearch with some extensions based on geo-location,
identification, application profiles, and the support for
The Figure 2 presents in more details the role of the multiple domains, in order to make it feasible the con-
components from the presented digcovery architecture. text awareness look-up for the digcovery mobile.
The green component presents the Service Layer, whose The third key component is the management func-
purpose is mainly to build the interfaces with the client tions and communication interfaces in order to interop-
applications and users through Web Services such as erate with third party platforms and solutions. It has
RESTFul or through Enterprise communications inter- been considered CoAP to be compatible with the cur-
faces such as JSON. On top of this is integrated solu- rent Internet of Things trends, SenML and JSON to
tions such as the application mobile digcovery for the be compliance with the IPSO Alliance and the IETF
usage of the digcovery architecture through mobile plat- trends for constrained devices.
forms in order to offer a higher interaction with the real The service discovery offered by the digcovery ar-
world and context awareness. chitecture provides a convenient way for applications
to discover and register network services, avoiding the
The dark blue components present the key compo-
need to manually enter IP addresses, server names or
nents designed, proposed and developed in order to pro-
port numbers.
vide a homogeneous an interoperable environment to
The following section present the resources integrated
discover, look-up and register services and resources.
into the digcovery architecture.
The main element is the digcovery, which is the global
discovery platform. This platform is used to locate the
different domains and the wide deployed directories with 3 Real World Integration
the different resources. The following elements are the
directories, which contains the resources and services The architecture presented considers the core, the value
description from each one of the domains, these direc- chain/network from the end-product to the backend
tories are not technology dependent, therefore this will systems from the manufacturer, and the global ecosys-
be connected with any other platform through a driver. tem which encloses this.
The considered platforms and the considered drivers The Internet of Things ecosystem is not only com-
are for the platforms such as the Electronic Product posed of IPv6-enabled devices and tiny objects with
Code (EPC) Information System for RFID tags, and communications and processing capabilities, so-called
the handle system for Digital Objects Identifiers (DOI). Smart Objects. This ecosystem is composed of diverse
Finally, it has been also proposed a Smart Object Dis- species of objects, from its origin it can be located the
covery Protocol based on current IPv6-based discov- things from the physical world.
ery protocols in order to enable the interaction between The sensors and actuators from physical world are
IPv6-enabled devices and the directory from its domain. located at fragmented solutions, since it can be found
Specifically, it has been defined a lightweight version of different verticals solutions with little overlap. It can be
the Domain Name Systems (DNS) extensions for local found different verticals solutions satisfying their spe-
discovery based on multicast, the called mDNS, and cific needs such as RFID and NFC for transportation in
Mobile Digcovery: Discovering and Interacting with the World through the Internet of Things 5

terms of logistics and ticketing respectively. Healthcare

with continuous patient monitoring through wireless
sensor networks based on ZigBee Health Device Profile,
6LoWPAN, and Bluetooth, which specific requirements
and needs such as mobility, real-time, and reliability. It
can be also considered building and home automation
with legacy technologies and proprietary protocols for
lighting, heating, cooling, and security which require
real-time and reliability. Energy for smart meters and
smart grid requires mainly reliability. Then, retail with
smart tags that are replacing the barcodes, which re-
quires energy-efficiency, low-cost, real-time, and scala-
bility.
Fig. 3 Digcovery integration.
The mentioned requirements needs to solve with the
characteristics of available technical alternatives and
standards from ETSI and OMA for M2M architectures relevant resources to build mash ups and mobile plat-
focused on cellular networks with support for reliabil- forms.
ity, low energy efficiency, high cost, and relatively bad
scalability.
IETF with the Working Groups ROLL, 6LoWPAN 3.1 Smart objects: IP-enabled devices
[14], Constrained Resources Applications (CORE) [8],
Lightweight Implementation Guidelines (LWIG) [15], The Internet protocol (IP) suite is a suitable solution
and Constrained Management (COMA), which are fo- to realize an Internet of Things (IoT), a network of tiny
cused on constrained devices and sensors to provide low networked embedded devices that create a link to the
cost protocols with high energy-efficiency and scalabil- physical world.
ity, but with no mobility support. The narrow waist of IP can be used to directly
access sensor readings throughout a sustainable city,
EPCGlobal for RFID with low cost, real time; wire-
acquire the necessary information for the smart grid,
less identification only, sensing capabilities are not stan-
or control smart homes, buildings, and factories seam-
dardized yet. And finally handle system for Digital Ob-
lessly from the existing information technology infras-
ject Identifiers with low cost, real-time, identification
tructure. The Internet protocol helps to abstract the
only, and none a pre-defined medium to carry out the
complexity from lower layers in multiple aspects such
identification, usually barcode or physical identifica-
as routing over lossy links, link layer adaption, and low-
tion.
power communication. These aspects, even when they
This integration of different resources is handled by are complex, are addressed through light-weight imple-
Digrectory. Digrectory is responsible for collecting ei- mentations that can run on resource-constrained de-
ther by NFC, 6LoWPAN, WebServices or mDNS the vices such as sensor nodes with only microcontroller
offered services by various devices that inhabit its do- units (MCUs), 10KiB of RAM, and 100KiB of ROM
main. Digrectory manages the new registered resources [15].
and enables to Digcovery the look-up of them through This potential for offering Internet capabilities through
the search engine presented in the Section 5. lightweight implementations is what have during the
The Figure 3 presents the resources considered, which last years make feasible a higher cyber-physical world
are mainly Smart Objects identified through IPv6 ad- integration, reaching the Internet of Things through the
dress. These objects are connected through technolo- IP-enabled devices.
gies such as 6LoWPAN, lwIP, IPv6 addressing Proxy The first IP-enabled devices were powered by lwIP
and GLoWBAL IPv6 [16]. In addition, it has been con- and uIP, both stacks provided by SICS [20]. This initial
sidered other physical resources identified through the approach was mainly focused on provide a lightweight
Digital Object Identifier (DOI) via the handle system implementation of the IP stack, lightweight in terms of
[17,18], or RFID resources identified through Electronic footprint i.e. RAM and ROM. After this, it has been re-
Product Code (EPC) and Universal ID (UID) [19]. Fi- quired also lightweight implementations of stacks which
nally, other resources can be integrated through Web are very important in wireless sensors with constrained
Services such as Bus Tracking services [21], weather resources in terms of memory, but also in terms of
forecast, and other public web services available with energy and communication capabilities (bandwidth).
6 Antonio J. Jara et al.

For that reason, new lightweight implementations of IP

such as 6LoWPAN [14] and GLoWBAL IPv6 [16] were
proposed.

6LoWPAN is a protocol defined by the Internet En-

gineering Task Force (IETF), which extends Wireless
Sensor Networks (WSN) to the Internet adding an adap-
tation layer to IEEE 802.15.4 in order to support IPv6.
It specifies a wireless link for low-power personal area
networks (LoWPANs). Such are characterized by more
limited capabilities than other WPANs (e.g. Bluetooth),
and WLANs (e.g. WiFi). 6LoWPAN has small frame
size, low data rate, limited bandwidth and power trans-
mitter. In addition to 6LoWPAN, in previous works it
has been defined other approaches for the integration
of IP in Smart Objects. Specifically, it has been pro- Fig. 4 Smart street lighting enabled with IEEE802.15.4g and
posed GLoWBAL IPv6 [16], which offers an aliasing IPSO profile.
scheme to offer a lightweight integration of IP over layer
4 and layer 5, avoiding the requirements to change layer
3 or integrate adaptation layers such as required by
6LoWPAN. GLoWBAL IPv6 is communication stack
independent; this is useful to enable integration with
IPv6 for existing networks based on closed stacks over
technologies such as the Bluetooth Low Energy and
IEEE 802.15.4. GLoWBAL IPv6 allows the integration
of IPv6 with more technologies than is feasible merely
with uIPv6 and 6LoWPAN.

The devices integrated through IP goes from print-

ers, lights, healthcare systems, and smart grid. It needs
to be taken into account the already available IP-enabled
embedded systems and consumer devices such as print-
ers, cameras, TVs and heating control systems. Second,
it will be also considered how to integrate the new gen-
Fig. 5 IP-based integration of resources.
eration of IP-enabled smart objects such as the defined
over 6LoWPAN and IEEE 802.15.4g.
3.2 Legacy technologies
IEEE 802.15.4g protocol extends the IEEE 802.15.4
protocols for its exploration in Advanced Metering In- The devices with relevant data for the development of
frastructure (AMI) for smart cities deployments. A proof mash-up solutions for monitoring and smart metering
of this new generation of IP-enabled devices have been solutions are not limited to IP-enabled devices, it needs
integrated in the mobile digcovery through a smart to be integrated several legacy technologies for gather-
lighting solution. The Figure 4 presents the smart lights ing the data available from existing sensors in order to
deployed at the street next to the Computer Science reach a higher context-awareness level.
Faculty from the University of Murcia. These lights are The mentioned architecture has defined digrectories
powered with IEEE 802.15.4g communications and the which acts as drivers between native services interfaces
Applications Profile [12] from the IPSO Alliance [11]. and CoAP-based interface, in order to map to the dig-
covery interfaces. Thereby, it is supported domains and
The Figure 5 presents as IP-enabled systems are in- subnets with different physical layer technologies using
tegrated from smart city systems such as the presented CoAP and similar naming conventions.
street lights to resources from smart buildings such as The digrectories adapt the legacy or proprietary de-
smart plugs and other sensors from opportunistic de- vices from the subnets/domains with different physical
vices, e.g. the sensors available in the smartphones. layer technologies using CoAP to integrate the different
Mobile Digcovery: Discovering and Interacting with the World through the Internet of Things 7

application layer protocols and different naming con-

ventions. For example, CoAP over BACnet, CoAP over
Konnex/EIB, or CoAP over X10 [22].
In addition to the services and resources adapta-
tion, a mechanism called IPv6 addressing Proxy [23]
has been proposed that map the addressing from any
native or legacy addressing or indexing space to IPv6.
Thereby, any legacy devices can be addressed through
IPv6 addressing globally, unifying the access to any de-
vice, resource or service through IPv6. This avoids using
different addressing, indexing or naming spaces.
Finally, it has been integrated legacy systems through
its digital identification. Thereby, it can be found physi-
cal objects, which have attached a RFID tag, as a smart
thing. Thereby, several properties and features of these
objects are gathered through the extended description
offered by the digrectory. At the same way, as it is being
carried out for RFID through the Electronic Product Fig. 6 Left: Bus stops discovery. Right: Reply for a specific
Codes (EPC), it is considered Digital Object Identifiers bus stop query.
(DOI) through the handle system. Thereby, books, doc-
uments and other virtual objects can be supported. The This query can be also for the line number using the
Section 4 presents how to interact with the real world prefix ”L”, e.g. L39 for the bus line from the University
through the identification of devices through identifica- to the city center.
tion systems based on EPC and DOI over RFID tags
and QR codes. Listing 1 Query to the bus tracking Web Service
POST s e r v i c i o w e b / r e s p o n s e . php HTTP/ 1 . 0
H o s t : www . e n t i d a d p u b l i c a d e l t r a n s p o r t e . e s
User−Agent : M o z i l l a / 4 . 5 [ en ]
A c c e p t : t e x t / html
Ac cep t−l a n g u a g e : en
Ac cep t−C h a r s e t : i s o −8859−1
3.3 Bus tracking through Web Services
t x t p e t i c i o n =2418

Embedded Web Services in the Smart Objects [10] and

Listing 2 Reply from the bus tracking Web Service
the available Web Services from existing resources present
HTTP/ 1 . 1 2 0 0 OK
other way for integrating relevant data from the real Date : Tue , 18 Sep 2 0 1 2 1 1 : 5 3 : 5 3 GMT
S e r v e r : Apache / 2 . 0 . 4 0 ( Red Hat L i n u x )
world. L a s t−M o d i f i e d : Tue , 18 Sep 2 0 1 2 1 1 : 5 3 : 5 3 GMT
Ac cep t−Ranges : b y t e s
Web Services offers a simple and intuitive interfaces Content−L e n g t h : 4 2 8
Connection : c l o s e
to interact with other platforms and systems. Particu- <HTML>
...
larly RESTFul is the predominant technology to build P2418 FACULTAD BELLAS ARTES
L39A CAMPUS ESPINARDO En p a r a d a . ( A)
the Web Services architecture for the IoT, and over the L39C CAMPUS UNIVERSIT . 17 min . ( A)
L38A CAMPUS UNIVERSIT . 21 min . ( A)
L39C URB. AGRIDULCE I I 77 min
RESTFul architecture, it is being defined lightweight ...
</HTML>
protocols such as CoAP for embedding Web Services
[10]. In addition to the Web Services offered by the Public
For example, digcovery integrates the bus tracking Transport Systems Organization, the functionality is
solution offered by the Public Transport Systems Or- extended with the Elastic Search engine integrated into
ganization from Murcia (Spain) [24]. This Web Service the digcovery architecture. This offers new services such
offers a set of resources about the bus stops, real time as locate the available bus stops around a position.
tracking, and estimated time for arrival for each one of The Figure 6 presents a screenshot of the applica-
the combinations of bus stop bus line. tion when it is looked-up the bus stops available around
Specifically, for the bus tracking integration is pre- a specific position, specifically the presented picture
sented a request based on RESTFul in the Listing 1. corresponds to the Campus of the University of Murcia.
This request requires a POST message with a ¡key, After, it can be queried the bus stop to get additional
value¿ pair. The key is ”txtpeticion” and the value is details. For example, the Figure 6 presents the next
the number of the bus stop, in this case is the ”2418”, buses for the stop ”2418”. The reply is presented in the
which is the identifier for the bus stop next to the Com- listing 2, where are listed the bus lines and the time
puter Science Faculty from the University of Murcia. estimated for the arrival.
8 Antonio J. Jara et al.

4 Real world interaction

The interaction with the real-world is carried out through

several technologies integrated nowadays in the smart-
phones and mobile platforms. Such as described in the
introduction, we are living the smartphone generation.
Smartphones are being enabled with geo-location
capabilities through Global Position Systems (GPS),
and also real time location systems and assisted geo-
location through the deployed WiFi networks. There-
fore, it is already available the capabilities to obtain the
current location of a smart phone and filter resources
and check available services by this, one of the existing
trends is the so-called augmented reality, where the re-
ality is extended with meta-information obtained from
the virtual world. In addition to the capabilities from
location, it is feasible to carry out a direct interaction
with the objects through its identification. Identifica- Fig. 7 Interaction between with things, tags, and clients.
tion has been historically carried out with barcodes for
global trade identification for the products. Nowadays,
mapped in a global level by the GS1-13, EAN-13 is the
it has been defined a new generation of barcodes called
main scheme used throughout Europe for retail article
Quick Response (QR) codes, which extends the legacy
numbering. This offers a 12 byte code (since the last is
one dimension barcode to two dimensions in order to
for checksum).
integrate higher quantity of data. Finally, new technolo-
Since the barcode is limited to the article number
gies for identification based on radio frequency such as
(12 bytes), it can be also used QR code. QR code offers
Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and Near Field
a higher storage capabilities. Therefore, this offers an
Communication (NFC) are making feasible the identifi-
identification number at the same way that the barcode,
cation of devices and objects without any direct vision,
but this also can link to Internet resources through the
higher distance than with the barcodes, obtaining also
inclusion of a Universal Resource Locator (URL), and
a high quantity of data, and making feasible to read
this can also includes description of the product or de-
multiple devices simultaneously.
vice.
Smartphones are enabled with location, cameras to
For the description of the product or device, it is
read barcodes/QR codes, and finally last generation of
formatted in JSON in order to structure it and make
mobile platforms are being powered with NFC in order
feasible a post-processing and smart search as described
to be able to interact with objects with just approach-
in the Section 5.
ing.
The stored data provides details about the connec-
The Figure 7 presents the interactions between the
tivity information such as IP address and port to reach
clients with the resources available in barcodes/tags
it through the network, and this can also includes ad-
and smart objects. The following subsections describes
ditional details such as the location position to display
how mobile digcovery uses the existing location and
the devices in the map. The listing 3 presents an ex-
identification technologies in the mobile platforms in
ample of the content for a QR code. That content is
order to build a context awareness solution for make
formatted in JSON following the format presented in
feasible the interaction and exploitation of the resources
the Figure 8.
integrated through the digcovery architecture.
Once the tag is parsed, its details and resources are
displayed in the mobile digcovery application to allow
4.1 Barcode/Quick Response codes the interaction of the user with the devices. The pre-
sented example contains the information of a printer
Most of the current smartphones are provided with a and an air conditioner available in one of the labs from
camera. Hence, a solution based on this may be used in the Computer Sciences Faculty in the University of Mur-
order to scan barcodes (1 dimension) and QR codes (2 cia.
dimensions). Smart things can be identified by reading The Figure 9 presents an example of the interaction
barcode and QR codes. On the one hand, it can be with the QR code, for this project, the smart-phone
read a European Article Number (EAN-13), which is used is a Samsung Galaxy S-III, which is based on An-
Mobile Digcovery: Discovering and Interacting with the World through the Internet of Things 9

4.2 RFID/NFC

RFID is one of the main technologies for IoT, since the

IoT concept was originally conceived as analogy of the
capabilities from RFID to identify any object around
the world in a global and unique way.
RFID improves the solutions based on barcodes be-
cause RFID cards and tags allow storing greater infor-
mation, while barcodes only allow storing an ID. Extra
memory is useful for storing information related to the
objects such as it has been presented for the QR codes.
RFID also brings advantages with respect to the QR
codes in terms of usage and dynamic status of the infor-
mation. First, the interaction with the RFID card/tag
is carried out with just approaching, while the barcode
and QR code requiring to focus with a camera. There-
fore, it makes feasible the usage of RFID card/tag for
elderly people and children. RFID tag/card can be read
a higher distance than barcodes/QR codes, and finally
it can be read multiple tags/cards simultaneously. Sec-
ond, the data stored in a RFID card/tag can be updated
Fig. 8 Printer discovery data structure. [26], while that the data stored in the barcodes/QR
codes is static, since it is defined in the printed code.
RFID brings security advantages [27], it is impor-
tant since some resources should not be published for
all the public, it is the case of home automation sys-
tems, private devices, and printers. These smart devices
should be available to interact with them but only with
the allowed users i.e. owner, family or people inside a
company. These devices or services are usually physi-
cally accessible only for the owner. The RFID technol-
ogy brings here a great help because a RFID tag could
contain the information for a certain services or devices
available and accessible in the physical space such as
home automation, security systems, printers, and Heat-
ing, Ventilating and Air Conditioners (HVAC). In addi-
tion, these cards/tags can be protected with password
Fig. 9 Printer discovery information presented in the dig-
covery mobile application through the QR interaction. to avoid that invited people can read it and take the
control of our systems. A less protected system is the
QR code, for example a printer can have a QR code on
the side or at the table that indicates the information
droid. Android allows the integration of multi-format needed to reach the device and use it to print docu-
1D/2D barcode decodification through the open source ments from a smartphone.
ZXing library [29].
Regarding smartphones, the version of RFID inte-
grated in smartphones, i.e. NFC, is also gaining high
Listing 3 Example of resource in JSON format relevance because its usability and capabilities to avail-
{
” room ” : ” l a b 2 . 6 ” ,
ability in the new generations of smartphones.
” device ” : [
{”name ” : ” P r i n t e r ” , ” i p ” : ” 1 5 5 . 5 4 . 2 0 4 . 2 4 8 ” , ” p o r t ” :
Therefore, NFC/RFID tags and cards are chosen
” nd ” , ” l a t i t u d e ” : ” 3 8 . 0 2 3 3 4 9 ” , ” l o n g i t u d e ” :
” −1.174777”} , for identification from the new generation of solutions
{”name ” : ” A i r C o n d i t i o n e r ” , ” i p ” : ” 1 5 5 . 5 4 . 2 0 5 . 2 0 ” , ”
p o r t ” : ” nd ” , ” l a t i t u d e ” : ” 3 8 . 0 2 3 2 9 9 ” , ” l o n g i t u d e ” : based on IoT for the mobile digcovery.
” −1.17473”}
] Mobile digcovery implements the ability to read ISO
}
14443 and ISO 15693 RFID tags, the 14443 type tag it
is the common tag used in several environments, some
10 Antonio J. Jara et al.

examples of these types of tags are MiFare and DesFire

tags. The ISO 15693 is a less common tag, in our case,
these tags are used on each rooms, i.e. classrooms, of-
fices and labs, in the University of Murcia to indicate
the patrimonial code. The patrimonial code is used to
manage the inventory of a location (room). These tags
are available in the wall at the side of the door and they
have been extended with the information of the avail-
able services and devices in the room such as printers
and HVAC systems. The Figure 10 presents the men-
tioned patrimonial tags.
The information available in a tag can be easily
read, updated, and matched with the corresponding
directory disposed to store the information of the de-
vices available in schools, commercial centers, enter-
prises. Specifically, the Universal Identifier Digital (UID)
is used to obtain additional information from the di-
grectory, when the tag has been previously registered.
The Figure 11 presents the interaction of the user
with the tags and the information gathered from them.
It can be seen that the information is also formatted in Fig. 10 Reading the RFID tags available on the walls from
JSON such as the presented for the QR codes. The for- the University of Murcia.
mat and storage capabilities from RFID and QR code
are equivalent, but with the described disadvantages of
QR in issues such as that the QR code is static, RFID
can storage dynamically data, and finally that RFID
tags are not increasing the size when the data capacity
is increased, i.e. it can be defined nanosize tags with
over 1KBits, while 1KBits of data in QR code requires
a very big size QR code.
In addition to the presented tag, it can be integrated
little tags to the smart things, for example the Inte-
grated Circuit (IC) model MiFare Ultralight (MF0ICU1)
from NXP Semiconductors. This is compatible for RFID
and NFC, i.e. ISO/IEC 14443-2 and 14443-3 (Type A)
compatible. This has a memory size of 512 bits (64
bytes). This reduced size tag is designed to store an
identifier, or a URL through technology such as NDEF
from NFC. In addition to the mentioned tag, bigger
tags can be also considered. Specifically the I-Code SLI,
which presents a doubled memory size, i.e. 1024 bits Fig. 11 Printer discovery information presented in the mo-
(128 bytes). An analysis among the different tags and bile digcovery application through the RFID interaction.
the rest of identification systems is presented in the pre-
vious work [25]
working means under a common domain, over a link-
local, which is usually mapped to a specific location, but
4.3 Location else when you extend it through Virtual LANs and tun-
nels, this lost the meaning of close in terms of distance.
In addition of the filtering by resource type, a way to At the same time, with the proliferation of Wireless
make easy the discovery for the end-user, in environ- networks such as 3G, LTE, WiFi and Wimax, you can
ments such as Smart Cities, is to discover services that be located next to one device, but belongs to domains
are around the user. totally different.
The meaning of close is very different from the net- For that reason, when it is addressing a discovery so-
working and physical point of view, since close in net- lution for domains such as Smart Cities, it is required to
Mobile Digcovery: Discovering and Interacting with the World through the Internet of Things 11

consider a global service discovery, where the integra- Digcovery presents an elastic architecture; this means
tion of multiple-domains is independent of the location, that several digrectories will be integrated with very dif-
i.e. it can be integrated multiple domains from a similar ferent types of resources from different locations. This
location, and then apply close concepts, and neighbor- integration is flexible and elastic, providing a mecha-
hood concepts through the interaction with the environ- nism to carry out global organized look-ups.
ment, i.e. physical interaction with tags and QR codes, Current solutions for discovery in the IoT such as
and mainly with the context awareness reached by the the CoAP Discovery, described in the RFC6690 [28],
geo-location of the devices over latitude and longitude defines the look-up/query based on resource types, i.e.
coordinates. this allows to filter the resources to be discovered spec-
A search engine optimized to offer a geo-location ifying a resource type (rt) in the query. Similar type
based queries and resource types-based look-ups is pre- of queries are supported into digcovery through this
sented in the Section 5. The integrated search engine elastic architecture. The main advantage from Elastic-
allows to manage multiple domains with heterogeneous Search is that offers the architecture and mechanisms
resources and services, even when multiple types of re- required to manage a distributed and heterogeneous set
sources and services are stored without a class, resource of repositories (digrectories), being able in an optimal
type or location organization. Thereby, this offers geo- time to get organized results filtered by resource type
location and context-awareness filtering has been in- (e.g. light), while that the CoAP Discovery is limited
tegrated through the ElasticSearch module from dig- to retrieve the results from the local domain or from
covery. The listing 4 presents an example of query for a single repository. Therefore, ElasticSearch offers the
geo-location filtering over the ElasticSearch module. same potential of CoAP Discovery without the limita-
Listing 4 Example of location filtering
tions of discovery in local domain (multicast-based) or
’{
to the resources of a centralized server (CoAP Resource
” query ” : {
”filtered” : {
Directory).
” query ” : {
” r a n g e ” : { ” l o n g i t u d e ” : { ” from ” : ” 3 7 . 9 9 7 ” ,
” to ” : ”37.999” } }
},
”filter” : {
” r a n g e ” : { ” l a t i t u d e ” : { ” from ” : ” −1.142” , ” t o ” :
” −1.140” } }
5.1 Digcovery database structure
}
}
}
}’
As we have mentioned before, the request will be made
via Web Services with a HTTP request. A HTTP re-
quest consists on the following format described in 5.
5 Search Engine Listing 5 Example of the URL structure for the Search En-
gine Query
Digcovery search engine is based on ElasticSearch, a URL : 9 3 0 0 / [ i n d e x / s u b n o d e 1 / s u b n o d e 2 / subnodeN / ] s e a r c h ? q= {
( JSON q u e r y ) }
document data base oriented that allows to make queries
through JSON language. The structure of JSON let us Index and subnodes are not necessary, but it is use-
reach a high complex queries to filter and obtain the ful to insert data in a specific subnode to have the data
specific results in a low time. ordered and filter the queries requests more efficiently.
ElasticSearch has been developed in Java and can
In our case, the index is the domain name in order
be request from HTTP, i.e. the requests will be sent via
to separate the services allocated on each one, and the
WebServices.
subnode is similar to a DNS pointer, that means the
ElasticSearch is an interesting tool for storing and
group of services allocated in the domain.
retrieving stored data quickly and with the possibil-
ity of getting JSON operations through the integration
with digcovery architecture, providing to digcovery a 5.1.1 Subnodes
scalable, distributed and very fast database with mul-
tiple options of access, as well as a search engine based The implemented database offers two ways to request
on RESTFul. the information, on the one hand it is possible access
ElasticSearch will be used for digcovery in order to, to all data (domain, services, pointers, txt) in a single
on the one hand, collect not organized data from the access in order to make general queries over a domain,
different digrectories and make feasible its look-up and and on the other hand, it is possible access to the data
filtering based on services and resource type, and on the from a specific service. These types of subnodes are the
other hand, to offer context awareness solutions based digcovery generic pointers, ”any” to access a domain
on geo-location. data and ”servicea” to access to services data.
12 Antonio J. Jara et al.

This offers the possibility to define new types of q u e r y :{

r a n g e :{ l o n g i t u d e :{
pointers specifically for a certain domain which rep- f r o m : 3 7 .997 , t o
: 3 7 .999 }}
resents multiple resources. For example, this allows to },
f i l t e r :{
define ’Lights’ as a representation of the group for all r a n g e
f r o m
:{
:
l a t i t u d e
−1.142 ,
:{
t o
the lights available in that domain, where the domain }
: −1.140 }}

can be represented at physical level by street, building, }

}

floor or campus level. }

5.2 Communication with Digcovery Search Engine 5.2.2 Response for the Mobile Digcovery

5.2.1 Request for the Mobile Digcovery The Digcovery response has several formats depending
of code request. In the ”geo” code case the response
The communication with the digcovery search engine is will be the called ServiceJS array. A ServiceJS is a com-
based on JSON. Therefore, the query is modeled by an pressed representation of a Service from Database. This
object that specifies the query code and the parame- object contains the fields presented in the listing 9.
ter object associated. The query object for the Generic
Listing 9 ServiceJS-based representation
Digcovery Request Structure (GDRS) is presented in Object ServiceJS{
the listing 6. S t r i n g name ,
I n t port ,
S t r i n g addr ,
S t r i n g gps ,
Listing 6 Digcovery Generic Request Structure (GDRS) S t r i n g serverAddr ,
Double l a t i t u d e ,
Object QueryRequest {
Double l o n g i t u d e
}
code : ” code value ” ,
data : ” parameter o b j e c t ”

} This array is received in JSON format with the nec-

essary information about a service. The name of the
This object is converted to JSON and sent via UDP. service has the DNS-SD format, therefore it is possible
There are several command codes to make queries to communicate with the sensor (if is a sensor) with the
the digcovery server. For example, the ”any” code al- protocol type included on the name.
lows client to request all domain data that includes ser- For example, it is possible to send a CoAP packet to
vices, pointers, and txt. obtain the temperature value from the resource named
The ”geo” code, allows to the mobile digcovery ob- ”temperature. coap. udp”. The address of a ServiceJS
tains the position of surrounding services. The param- contains the IPv6 address of the sensor service, this
eters object is different for each type of code request, means that to connect via IPv4 it is needed use the
in this case is interesting explain the ”geo” parameter serverAddr (address of the server). Finally, the server
object that is being used by mobile digcovery. The pa- offers the DigcoveryRedirector module, which translates
rameter object for ”geo” code is presented in the listing from IPv4 to IPv6 in order to reach the sensor in the
7. 6LoWPAN, GLoWBAL IPv6 or uIPv6 network, such
Listing 7 Example of GeoPoint Object fit in digcovery query as described in the Section 3.1.
structure
Object GeoPoint {
latitude : x ,
longitude : y
d i s t a n c e : m ( meters ) 5.3 Digcovery CoAP Service Protocol (DCSP)
}

The digcovery server receives this object and parses A CoAP interface is offered to communicate with any
it to make the necessary query to filter the results re- service or resource provided by through CoAP. A sim-
turned by ElasticSearch and send the responses to mo- ple application protocol to get the specific commands
bile digcovery. This parser calculates the quarter allo- that each sensor dispose has been defined over the Elas-
cated between our position and the max distance of the ticSearch engine.
query. This allows to carry out a located search in or- This interface allows to check the command list,
der to enhance the search efficiency. This means, that such as the Get command defined in HTTP, and re-
a mobile digcovery request is parsed as a ElasticSearch used for Web Services over the REST architecture, this
query, such as presented in the listing 8. command is necessary to discovery the specific com-
mand for each sensor in order to communicate with it
Listing 8 Example of GeoLocation ElasticSearch Query
via CoAP, The listing 10 presents the structure for the
q u e r y : {
f i l t e r e d :{ CoAP protocol.
Mobile Digcovery: Discovering and Interacting with the World through the Internet of Things 13

Listing 10 Get command the interaction between the applications and the sen-
c o a p : / /GET c l sors/services.
That command returns an array of command inter- Among the works related with the way to connect
face in JSON format as will be shown in the listing 11. with wireless sensors, some of the closer works to the
This output can be returned by a device composed by presented contribution are addressing the connectivity
two devices, a light actuator and a temperature sen- of smartphones with sensors connected to wireless sen-
sor. This presents the GET, PUT, and DEL available sor networks, and many others that can be reached
commands. For example for the temperature sensor are through the Internet infrastructure through Web Ser-
only available GET commands, since it is a sensor and vices.
offers read-only resources. Other example is the light Specifically, there are several ways to reach a sensor
actuator, which is also offering PUT commands since located in a sensor network from a smartphone, the first
it is an actuator and offers resources to act over the way is adapt the 802.15.4 hardware to the smartphone,
device, for example in this case switch the light. the work located in [30] presents a hardware named uSD
that uses SD card port to bring ZigBee connectivity
Listing 11 Example of command interface sent by the sensor
and a middleware to manage the hardware and inter-
as response to the previous get command
[
act with the sensors. Other example of adapted ZigBee
{
”name ” : ” c o a p . u d p . l i g h t ”
hardware is located in [34], where a custom hardware
”GET” : ” l i g h t s t a t u s ” ,
”PUT” : ” s w i t c h ” ,
connected via USB reaches clinical devices and allows to
},
”DEL ” : ” n u l l ”
the smartphone acts as a gateway to connect the men-
{
”name ” : ” c o a p . u d p . t e m p e r a t u r e ” tioned devices with the backend. Other ways to reach
”GET” : ” t e m p s t a t u s ” ,
”PUT” : ” n u l l ” , a sensor that is within a Wireless Sensor Network is to
”DEL ” : ” n u l l ”
}] use a gateway that offers the Web Services. Similarly,
the work defined in [31] presents a middleware to carry
Regarding to the JSON structure, the name field is
out the access to sensors and cameras from the user.
the command type that must be sent via CoAP (except
The majority of the works available in the state of
”name” field), and the value is the particular command
the art for the Internet of Things connectivy for Smart
of the sensor to interact with it. For example, the listing
Objects present IPv6 and 6LoWPAN as the most suit-
12 presents a get command for the temperature of the
able protocols to reach a global connectivity for sensor,
sensor with the ”temp status” payload.
the work carried out in [32] presents an example of how
Listing 12 Get command for specific resource to reach a temperature sensor through a smartphone
c o a p : / /GET t e m p s t a t u s enhanced with 802.15.4 physical medium using 6LoW-
Otherwise if we want turn off the light, it is sent the PAN network protocol to access the sensor.
packet presented in the listing 13, which puts the value Some works and applications use the smartphones
0 over the resource switch. to exploit the services offered by sensors. These works
Listing 13 Put command to establish the status for a re-
present how to use a backend to obtain information or
source even where the smartphone is used as a sensor or bridge
c o a p : / /PUT s w i t c h to communicate with the backend. These applications
payload : 0 are related with several environments or topics. Specif-
ically, the work presented in [33] uses an smartphone
with iOS to access a WebServer that manages a home
6 Related Works automation security system based on X10, example of
the capabilities from that work in term of Machine to
Such as it has been presented, the IoT provides con- Machine communication is that when a motion sensor
nectivity between people, devices, services and smart detects any activity, this activates the cameras to record
objects allowing develop new ways to interact with the the environment and advise the homeowner. The work
environment. presented in [35] implements a framework for body area
Several works have been proposed for interacting sensor networks based on Bluetooth where they uses the
with the Internet of Things. Many of these works are smartphone as a gateway to transport the information
related to smartphones, since these consumer devices gathered from the body sensors and processed into the
offer a huge set of capabilities to process and connect smartphone to the backend.
with the things that are located surround the users. There are other many smartphone applications are
Some works are related to the way to connect with applied to transport, e.g. the work presented in [36] en-
the sensors, and many others about how to carry out ables the remote control of a car using through a OSGi-
14 Antonio J. Jara et al.

based middleware and the communication of control in our application its possible address the use of this
commands within the car its carry out through Control service/device to another mobile application designed
Area Network. Other application that relates the smart- for the service. Therefore, mobile digcovery is offering
phone with sensors in transport is located at [37]. In several ways to discover resources, in terms of services
this case, the spaces available in a parking are detected and services, through innovative technologies such as
through a wireless sensor node that uses a luxometer RFID/NFC and QR codes. But it is not limited to the
in order to detect the presence of a car in the parking discovery of the services and devices.
lot. The backend manages the use of the parking and Second, it has been offered the capabilities to in-
the reservation service, which can be reached through tegrate and support legacy technologies. Specifically,
cellular network or the home gateway to reach Internet. it has been defined digrectories which acts as drivers
To finalize the examples of public transport solutions, between native services interfaces and CoAP-based in-
the document [38] introduces the architecture and ap- terface, in order to map to the digcovery interfaces.
plication used by Edinburg city council to carry out a Thereby, it is supported domains and subnets with dif-
bus web service, one of the most popular systems that ferent physical layer technologies using CoAP and sim-
are being used currently. ilar naming conventions.
Most applications are accessing wireless sensors in- The digrectories adapt the legacy or proprietary de-
tegrated in homes, cars, and clinical environments, and vices from the subnets/domains with different physi-
web services from government or private enterprises cal layer technologies using CoAP to integrate the dif-
that offers several web services in a smart city as in ferent application layer protocols and different naming
the case presented in [39], where a smartphone appli- conventions. For example, CoAP over BACnet, CoAP
cation provides a middleware for U-city based on cloud over Konnex/EIB, or CoAP over X10. The IoT6 Eu-
computing to enable users to use, manage and moni- ropean Project is currently working in this integration
tor mobile cloud computing for U-city services without from several building automation technologies to IoT-
expert knowledge. enabled interfaces (i.e. CoAP and IPv6).
The Table 1 presents the comparability among the Third, in addition to the integration of legacy de-
mentioned works in terms of connectivity, i.e. IPv6 con- vice, Electronic Product Code Information System (EP-
nectivity, interoperability through Web Services, sup- CIS) has being integrated. Thereby, it can be found
port for legacy technologies, and the required hard- physical objects, which have attached a RFID/NFC
ware to reach a suitable integration. This also addresses tag, as a smart thing. This offers the benefits of that
other issues about interaction, i.e. support for interac- several properties and features of these objects are gath-
tion through RFID/NFC and barcode/QR code. The ered through the extended description offered by the
discussion located in the Section 7 presents the main EPCIS. At the same way, as it is being carried out for
differences between the related works and the proposed RFID through the Electronic Product Codes (EPC),
mobile digcovery. it is being also considered for ongoing work the Digital
Object Identifiers (DOI) through the handle system [17,
7 Discussion 18]. Thereby, it can be also used for books, documents,
movies (DVDs, BRs), and music (CDs, MP3).
The previous section has presented several isolated so- Fourth, mobile digcovery exploits the capabilities to
lutions for bus tracking, middleware for home automa- obtain geo-location information by the smart phones
tion, and finally WebServices-based platforms to inte- and mobile platforms through systems such as Real
grate sensors with smartphones. Time Location Systems based on WiFi networks and
First, in most cases it is necessary to know the the GPS system based on Satellite, in order to reach a
existence of the sensors or services beforehand. That higher context awareness. For this purpose, this work
is why the work carried out in this paper introduces has presented in a novel way the exploitation of the
an innovation in the sense that this application allows ElasticSearch architecture for the integration and fil-
discover sensors and services that are surrounding us tering from JSON-structured data extracted from the
through geo-location and context awareness capabili- resources itself, in order to reach a suitable solution for
ties. These services can be discovered in different ways; filtering by resource types and location.
either through the backend deployed where anyone can Finally, digcovery can be seen by other platforms
report their services offered to the public or through as a middleware, for example it is being integrated
RFID tags / QR codes to discover services and devices with Global Sensor Network architecture (GSN) [40,
that should be accessible only if you have physical ac- 41], which is one of the most extended low-power em-
cess to them. After the service or sensor is discovered bedded wireless network middleware architectures. Dig-
Mobile Digcovery: Discovering and Interacting with the World through the Internet of Things 15

Table 1 State of the art analysis.

Feature/Solution Digcovery [30] [31] [32] [33] [34] [35] [36] [37] [38] [39]
Mobile
Backend systems required Yes No Yes No Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
Support for legacy Yes No No No No No No No No No No
sensors (e.g. X10)
Support for IPv6 sensors Yes No No Yes Yes* No No Yes* No No No
Support for WebServices CoAP & No HTTP HTTP HTTP No No No No HTTP HTTP
(e.g. CoAP/HTTP) HTTP
Discover resources via Yes Local No No No Yes Yes No No Yes Yes
IP protocols (e.g. mDNS)
Discover resources Yes No No No No No No No No No No
via RFID/QR/Barcode
Hardware required No Yes No No No Yes No No No No No
(e.g. Zigbee adapter)

covery allows to export devices and services discovered objects can be discoverable, accessible, available, us-
directly to GSN framework. Thereby, it makes simple able, and interoperable. For this purpose, it has been
the use of management of the services and devices lo- defined through the digcovery architecture developed
cated around the world for personal or industrial pur- in the IoT6 European Project [42]. Digcovery architec-
pose. Thereby, GSN offers the application specific ser- ture offers a homogeneous and suitable mechanism for
vices to be built over digcovery architecture. GSN al- the global resource discovery, devices access for the de-
lows collecting the data from the sensors, managing ployed smart objects in the different scenarios and the
statistics, raising alarms, etc. Therefore, with the op- integration of legacy and already available sensors in
tions and interfaces offered by digcovery to enable the the smart buildings and in the smart cities. These are
integration with third party platforms such as GSN, it is required features for a solution based on Internet of
offered a flexible and scalable environment to discovery, Things.
look-up, manages, and uses the data from the Smart This work has presented as different resources avail-
Things, EPCIS, Handle System (DOI) and legacy tech- able in the real world are integrated. Specifically, it is
nologies such as BACNET, KNX and X10. presented as IP-enabled devices are integrated through
novel protocols such as 6LoWPAN [14] and the de-
veloped protocol GLoWBAL IPv6 [16], WebServices-
8 Conclusions and ongoing works based resources such as the bus tracking solution from
the Murcia Region, and finally legacy resources from
The quantity of devices and data-available is increas- building automation and identification systems such as
ing continuously. It is estimated more than 50 billions the based on Digital Object Identifier and Electronic
of devices by 2020, nowadays in 2012, we have 12.5 bil- Product Codes.
lion of connected devices, and since 2008 we have more The integration of the mentioned sub-systems is part
connected devices to Internet than people in the world of the IoT6 work, where several institutions are collabo-
reaching a real Internet of Things. At the same time, rating for this purpose. For example, Technical Univer-
during the last decade the smart phones are presented sity of Vienna (TUV) is collaborating in the integration
a new way to interact with the world and access to In- of Building Automation sub-systems [22], while Korea
ternet. Now, it is required new mechanisms to exploit Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)
the available resources through the smart phones, since is collaboration with the integration of the Electronic
the number of resources i.e. services and devices are Product Code Information Systems (EPCIS) [19].
increasing, it is required higher context-awareness and This work has presented as mobile digcovery thanks
location enabled solutions in order to filter and make to the integration reached by the digcovery architec-
more usable these resources for the citizens. Therefore, ture, it is feasible to exploit the geo-location and con-
it is required discovery solutions. text awareness capabilities from the mobile platforms
This paper has presented the possibility of utiliz- such as smart phones. Specifically, the interaction through
ing new technologies in order to enable that the smart QR codes, RFID tags and location-based filtering has
16 Antonio J. Jara et al.

been presented. Thereby, mobile digcovery offers context- tics and sport, for sponsoring this research activity with the
awareness capabilities for the discovery of resources via grant FPU program (AP2009-3981).
the identification and location subsystems available in
the mobile platforms.
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