Data Collecting And Sharing Platform For Smart Things

With the development in wireless communication and embedded computing, smartthings emerged as a new computing and communicating platform with small size and lowenergy consumption. Now smart things have been widely used in a lot of areas such asindustrial and environmental surveillance, collecting useful data from the real world.However, since different smart things have different architecture, support differentcommunicating protocols, there are still some obstacles needed to be overwhelmed tointegrate them into the real applications. If there is a common platform that can providenetwork access, hide the heterogeneity of smart things, support data collecting and sharingamong the applications, it can greatly expand the application of smart things.STDCS(Smart Things-oriented Data Collecting and Sharing) can provide internetaccess, data storage and management to heterogeneous smart things, and then support datasharing among applications. Since using a common communication protocol to support allsmart things is not realistic. STDCS platform has the hierarchy structure, in which gatewayis put between the platform and smart things. The gateways support the smart things’ privatecommunications protocol which can link STDCS platform and smart things. Because thegateways are extensible, so that all smart things can access to the Internet and upload datathrough the gateways. After that, STDCS platform can store and manage the data generatedby smart things. STDCS platform can also provide data services to applications through aneasily used Restful web service interface. STDCS platform can also generate data acquisitiontask according to the needs of applications. Through the gateways the task will be issued tosmart things and make smart things work according to requirement of applications. This canreduce the energy consumption and extend the lifetime of smart things.Function and performance test shows that STDCS platform completes its functions andachieves its target. Compared with other platforms, STDCS supports more types ofheterogeneous smart things through extensible gateway, provides Pull based data collectingmode that can reduce the energy consumption and extend the lifetime of smart things, andhas a more convenient Restful API to implement application integrating.