SmartData: an IoT-ready API for sensor networks
Antônio Augusto Fröhlich · International Journal of Sensor Networks · 2018
Despite intense research on wireless sensor networks (WSN) in the last two decades, programmers still do not have a cohesive and expressive application programming interface (API) to model their applications and to connect them to the internet of things (IoT). In this paper, we introduced SmartData, a high-level API for WSN aiming at leveraging the myriad of features available on such networks while delivering a common abstraction for sensed data that facilitates application development without incurring significant overhead. SmartData is enriched with enough metadata to become self-contained regarding semantics, spatial location, timing, and trustfulness. It is meant to be the only application-visible construct in the platform and therefore implicitly mediates all system services, including communication, synchronisation, and the interaction with transducers and actuators, local or remote. Reading a SmartData implies in sensing. Writing to it defines a new setpoint for actuators. We demonstrate the concept through the automation of a solar building with a set of SmartData in C++.