On the Role of Semantic Descriptions for Adaptable Protocol Stacks in the Internet of Things

With Internet of Things applications covering several application domains (e.g., Smart Grid, Smart City, e-Health) with a diverse range of requirements, it is now becoming increasingly recognized that the variety of wireless technologies employed for Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication is here to stay. Due to the heterogeneity of M2M appliances and communication modes, research has been investigating autonomic principles as an efficient instrument for the integration of large populations of dissimilar M2M devices to the M2M gateway and the overall end-to-end M2M architecture. Herein we present the status of semantic support for the IoT field by briefly surveying research efforts in IoT dealing with semantic concerns at the architecture level. We also summarize the state of the art in adaptable protocol stacks and make the case for their application as an efficiency enabler instrument for IoT. To this end, we present our work in an ontology used to semantically describe the adaptation options of the dynamic protocol stacks for future communication devices. We present the ontology design principles and artifacts and elaborate on the level of semantic support it enables for IoT. Finally, we conclude the paper with our next steps in the area of semantic support for IoT.