"Things-Cloud-People":an Implementation Scheme Of "Web Of Things"

The Internet of Things which is digitalizing the real world and giving objects intelligence has achieved communication and dialog between people and things or between things themselves, and it has a wide range of applications. With more and more devices connected to the Internet, using the World Wide Web and its related technologies as a platform of smart devices will be the next stage of development of the Internet."Web of Things", a concept inspired from the Internet of Things, is to construct a RESTful architecture by using the widely deployed and highly recognized Web protocols and standards such as HTTP to connect the rapidly expanding smart objects ecosystems."Web of Things" is a new concept and currently there is no related research in China. Research of "Web of Things" in foreign countries still stays in the investigating stage, and there is not a complete implementation. The implementation schemes proposed by most research are often too heavy for low power objects because there are too much protocol layers. The Web servers implemented in objects have poor performance on scalability and are difficult to support event mechanism. This paper argues that the communications between people and things and between things themselves are essentially different.By combining the concept of cloud computing, this paper proposed an implement scheme of "Web of Things" based on previous studies-"Things-Cloud-People", it separates the two means of communications, stores data on an independent Cloud, implements RESTful API for things, implements event mechanism and allows user to create scripts. The Cloud will execute scripts when receiving signals from things. A protocol for the communication between things is proposed to make the interfaces coherent. This paper further abstracted the people into a special class of things so that the Things, Cloud and People are integrated together. The target of this paper is to build an undifferentiated world of things. People can touch the whole world through the Cloud.This paper implemented the program with Java. Things communication protocol is based on JSON. Data persistence is completed with Hibernate and MySQL. Web functionalities are implemented with Struts and Tomcat. Spring resolved the dependency and managed the database transactions. A multi-thread class SignalDispatcher completed the task of signal receiving and script execution.At last, this paper envisages a scene in which a thermometer will twitter a message to Sina microblogging site when its temperature meets certain conditions defined by its owner. We wrote two applications (one analog thermometer, the other for microblogging) and deployed experiment environment on three machines. The experimental results showed that the Cloud was feature-rich and easy to use. Events are handled correctly by the Cloud.