Towards an integrated internet of things: Current approaches and challenges

With the diffusion of sensors and smart devices, and the advances in connection technologies, the Internet of Things (IoT) has become a very popular topic. Because of the creation and expansion of new and existing sensor networks, the need to define a common standard for sensors’ interfaces representation has arisen. Currently it is difficult to make different sensors and sensors’ networks interoperate seamlessly, since their interfaces are not always well specified or are not ready to be adapted immediately to one another. In this chapter we will introduce the main technologies currently available to define a machine readable and human comprehensible IoT API, and we will point out the several challenges which will derive from an automatic analysis and description of IoT interfaces. Security issues are also considered and discussed.