Enabling Semantics in an M2M/IoT Service Delivery Platform

Internet-of-Things (IoT) and Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications provide great opportunities to connect various devices, such as sensors and actuators, and to collect and process the gathered data. This in turn, enables the types of services making smart homes and intelligent transportation applications a reality. For applications or services from different verticals (e.g., smart home and smart transportation) to share and re-use information, and to collaborate with each other, interworking and interoperability have become essential. However, interworking and interoperability across verticals have not yet been fully addressed in the context of M2M/IoT. With the focus on sharing data between different applications and services, semantics is considered an ideal technique to provide a common base for interworking and interoperation. In this paper, a novel architecture is proposed for integrating semantics into an M2M/IoT service delivery platform (SDP). The proposed open architecture is flexible and extensible, as the semantics can be integrated in different ways with various types of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), which allows the utilization of different types of protocols. A use case study is also provided to highlight how to utilize semantics service integrated into the M2M/IoT service platform for interworking and interoperability.