Solid-if-IoT: An Internet of Things Client Bridge to Interface with Solid Backend Infrastructure
Zachary Grider, Alexander Nelson · 2024
Web decentralization has the potential to radically change the way we produce, store, and manage data. Much of the focus of decentralization has been on blockchain tech-nologies which have high energy requirements. An alternative and potentially complementary decentralization technology exists in the form of the Solid project. Solid primarily exists for the decentralization of online social data that is prevalent in social media. However, many of the key challenges to realizing a decentralized social web exist in the current Internet of Things (IoT). IoT-especially industrial IoT-is currently a collection of many intranets of things rather than an interconnected network of machines. Those devices that are public facing produce data and consume commands often devoid of context. Devices at the edge are resource constrained and the overhead of many decentralization technologies may be technologically infeasible or would result in performance degradation. It is our hypothesis that a mechanism to overcome some of these challenges can exist in the form of a client bridge to integrate IoT devices with the Solid infrastructure, which would in turn enable finer access control and improved context that are necessary to realize a more interconnected Internet of Things. This work demonstrates the feasibility of this paradigm, and plots future directions to bring this technology to fruition.