Resource-oriented Architecture toward Efficient
Device Management and Service Enablement
Brighter Agyemang, Yang Xu*, Nantogma Sulemana, Ming Liu
School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China
Chengdu, Sichuan, 611731, P.R.China
Email: xuyang@uestc.edu.cn
Abstract—Recent advances in the Internet-of-Things has given
rise to the possibility of connecting different kinds of devices to
the internet. With low computing resources constraining most IoT
devices and their networks, managing the capabilities and ser-
vices of the various constrained devices over the internet has been
an issue for IoT implementations. Existing approaches to this
problem lack end-to-end resource-oriented Device Management
architecture for resource constrained devices and their networks
as a result of protocol fragmentation in the domain. This study
first proposes a Device Management architecture which is able to
leverage more than one protocol in addressing this problem. We
then base on the architecture to put forward an implementation
approach to manifesting this solution through our usage of a
simulated Smart Building case study. The analysis of the case
study shows that the proposed resource-oriented architecture
achieves device management and service enablement operations
with good performance.
I. INTRODUCTION
The Internet, these days, plays a vital role in our world and
this is manifested in the countless number of applications in
areas such as as e-commerce, governance, research, and health.
The capabilities of the Internet which has made it successful in
such domains has contributed to its extension to the connection
of various physical devices in our world to the internet to
realize the Internet-of-Things (IoT). This characteristic feature
of the IoT opens the door for applications such as smart homes
and buildings, smart sensing and actuation, remote health care,
and many others. However, like any promising technology,
there are certain challenges that present themselves in IoT
implementations.
One of the major challenges of the IoT is the management
of these devices due to their resource constraints and their
simple designs such as low power, limited memory, and usage
of short-range communication technologies [1] that mostly
characterizes entities in Constrained RESTful Environments
(CoRE) [?]. Device Management (DM), in terms of the IoT,
can be seen as the control of capabilities and services of the
physical devices connected to the internet [2]. An instance is
being able to trigger a firmware update on a deployed device
remotely. According to [2], DM functions can be catego-
rized into Device Configuration function, Device Diagnostics
and Monitoring, Device Firmware Management, and Device
Topology Management.
As pointed out by [3], identification and discovery of the
things participating in the IoT is a major challenge to these DM
functions. Connected devices have to be uniquely identifiable
as well as discoverable by other participating entities. Also,
to enable discovery of connected devices, this calls for the
representation of endpoints in the IoT as resources which can
be accessed and operated upon on the internet as demonstrated
in [4]. However, with many existing and mostly disjointed ap-
proaches or protocols to achieving this resource representation
of endpoints, there is the need for an approach that blends
different representational mechanisms. This harmonization of
different DM protocols also provides an approach for issuing
DM commands in one protocol and effecting it on different
others.
Although existing studies have produced several frameworks
and ideas to address the aforementioned challenges, very little
has been done in terms of providing a platform or architecture
which possesses the ability to use more than a single protocol
in enabling the main categories of DM operations mentioned
earlier. In this work, we not only put forward a resource-
oriented DM architecture that is able to leverage more than a
single protocol or DM approach for the IoT but also expound,
from an implementation perspective, how this architecture
is made manifest to address the challenges raised. We use
two of the leading protocols in the domain, the OneM2M
and the LWM2M protocols, to achieve this implementation
in a simulated Smart Building case study. The OneM2M
protocol, aside providing an effective resource-based protocol
for service provisioning such as DM functions for application
entities, it also enables us to demonstrate how new device
definitions can be configured at runtime in our approach other
than the protocol’s approach where device representations
(management objects/definitions) are specified at design time.
The usage of the LWM2M protocol also addresses the idea
of using constrained devices and networks targeted Remote
Entity Management (REM) DM approach since it is developed
on the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) [5].
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section II
presents related research works in the IoT DM domain, section
III presents our proposed architecture, section IV discusses
our smart building case study as well as the analysis of the
implemented architecture, and section V presents the summary
of our work.
II. RELATED WORKS
The study in [6] advocated for an integrated device man-
agement middleware that would have device configuration,
2017 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC)
Banff Center, Banff, Canada, October 5-8, 2017
978-1-5386-1645-1/17/$31.00 ©2017 IEEE 2561
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