Internet of Things – Architecture © - 79 -
Virtual Entity
The Virtual Entity FG contains functions for interacting with the IoT System on
the basis of VEs, as well as functionalities for discovering and looking up
Services that can provide information about VEs, or which allow the interaction
with VEs. Furthermore, it contains all the functionality needed for managing
associations, as well as dynamically finding new associations and monitoring
their validity. This need can be triggered by the mobility of Physcial Entities
represented by the Virtual Entities and/or Devices.
IoT Service
The IoT Service Functional Group contains IoT Services as well as
functionalities for discovery, look-up, and name resolution of IoT Services.
3.5.2.4 Communication
The Communication FG abstracts the variety of interaction schemes derived
from the many technologies (Device FG) belonging to IoT systems and provides
a common interface to the IoT Service FG. It provides a simple interface for
instantiating and for managing high-level information flow. In particular, the
following aspects are taken into account: starting from the top layers of the
ISO/OSI model it considers data representation, end to end path information,
addressing issues (i.e. Locator/ID split), network management and device
specific features.
The Communication FG can be customised according to the different
requirements defined in the Unified Requirements list and, in particular, those
related to communication specified within WP3. For instance, integrity and
security can be enforced exploiting many different signature and encryption
schemes at various ISO/OSI layers; reliability is achieved either by means of
link layer acknowledgements or end to end error correction schemes at the
upper layers; quality of service is realised by providing queue management
techniques; finally, in order to account for communication between different
technologies, protocol translation and context passing functionalities are
described.
3.5.2.5 Management
The Management FG combines all functionalities that are needed to govern an
IoT system. The need for management can be traced back to at least four high-
level system goals [Pras 1995]:
Cost reduction; Attending unexpected usage issues; Fault handling;