What Can I Do Here? Iot Service Discovery In Smart Cities

The vision of smart cities and IoT is an environment blanketed with interconnected, software-enabled devices. Unlike software installed on personal devices, however, people may not know about services in the environment, or may not even be the intended users. People lack a unified way to discover software services in a smart city infrastructure, and the current device-centric approach to IoT is inconsistent with the growing network and software services associated with these devices. In this paper we outline changes needed in the current IoT framework to shift to a service model for IoT. We describe how, similar to users of a personal computing device, users can define their preferences, install services, and manage the data that is generated and consumed by services. In this framework, service preferences provide a basis for proper service discovery. As an illustration of the proposed model, we provide modifications to the well established Auto-ID Object Name Service and Physical Markup Language architecture to demonstrate how a practical system can support the concept of IoT services and discovery.