A Transparent IPv6 Multi-protocol Gateway to Integrate Building Automation Systems in the Internet of Things

The future Internet of Things (IoT) should enable machine-to-machine interaction for devices out of numerous domains. Recent developments and standards focus on how to deploy IP directly on devices and investigate application protocols that fit the constrained environments, whereas research on the integration of widely deployed legacy devices of technologies like BACnet, Lon Works and KNX is still neglected. For a success of the ambitions towards an IoT we identify it of highest importance to research various integration styles for non-IP based devices already deployed in home and building automation. Therefore, this paper contributes an overview of various possible integration styles, provides a concrete multi-protocol integration architecture and presents evaluation results of a proof of concept implementation.

I. Introduction

The Internet of Things (IoT) promises to interconnect billions of devices out of different domains, ranging from supply chains, telecommunications, home and building automation, entertainment and more recently also smart metering and smart grid infrastructures. For the desired interconnection, a trend towards Web service based communication protocols resting on HTTP and XML can be seen. Also, resource oriented so called RESTful Web services seem to be favored over SOAP based approaches which tend to be better suited for the integration of enterprise IT systems.