SeaHttp: A Resource-Oriented Protocol to Extend REST Style for Web of Things

Web of Things (WoT) makes it possible to connect tremendous embedded devices to web in Representational State Transfer (REST) style. Some lightweight RESTful protocols have been proposed for the WoT to replace the HTTP protocol running on embedded devices. However, they keep the principal characteristic of the REST style. In particular, they support one-to-one requests in the client–server mode by four standard RESTful methods (GET, PUT, POST, and DELETE). This characteristic is however inconsistent with the practical networks of embedded devices, which typically perform a group operation. In order to meet the requirement of group communication in the WoT, we propose a resource-oriented protocol called SeaHttp to extend the REST style by introducing two new methods, namely BRANCH and COMBINE respectively. SeaHttp supports parallel processing of group requests by means of splitting and merging them. In addition SeaHttp adds spatiotemporal attributes to the standard URI for naming a dynamic request group of physical resource. Experimental results show that SeaHttp can reduce average energy consumption of group communication in the WoT by 18.5%, compared with the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP).