Lightweight Remote Control of Distributed Web-of-Things Platforms: First Prototype

Web of Things is the concept of controlling smart and communicating systems, Connected Objects (COs), through Web applications. Web technologies offer interoperable and flexible technologies to implement sophisticated GUI to control COs. However, such technologies are very limited in terms of communication protocols. This paper proposes a lightweight platform to control COs via Web applications without adding any extension to the Web browser. For this, only the standardized protocol HTTP is used by exploiting two JavaScript objects: (i) XMLHttpRequest for synchronous communication and (ii) EventSource for CO-to-Web application communication. The proposed platform implements the basic functionalities, inspired from OUPnP/UPNP, for remote monitoring and controlling of COs such as: (a) Discovering to allow COs advertising their presence to Web applications and Web applications to find available COs, (b) Description to know how controlling COs and their services, (c) Controlling to allow Web application invoking COs services, and finally (d) Eventing to allow CO sending notifications to the adequate Web applications. Moreover, this platform allows dynamic incorporation of pre-implemented control panel (fragment of Web page) on the Web application to control COs.