A Study of Middleware for Pluggable UI in IoT-Enabled Environment

In recent years, advances in several key technologies in Internet of Things (IoT), such as radio-frequency identification, wireless sensor network, embedded intelligence and nanotechnology, and micro electro mechanical systems have brought enormous progresses in developing IoT-based applications. IoT integrates heterogeneous intelligent devices and supports interoperability between devices through Internet and various communication technologies, which also helps bridge the physical world and virtual world. Therefore, for IoT application developers, it is important to have a mechanism that can provide a uniform accessible interface, called middleware, which hides technical details of accessing hardware devices from application developers and helps them to concentrate their focus on the software portion of the IoT applications. To deal with this issue, we proposed, in this paper, a middleware architecture that is designed based on software engineering point of view to assist developers with an easier way to establish communication links between devices and their applications, in which devices can be plugged into a system and the user interface for accessing these devices can be downloaded, installed, and displayed on the system. To be more specific, features for manipulating a device are captured in a description file and are used as a means for matching and downloading an appropriate pluggable user interface component through the middleware. Furthermore, by using the proposed middleware, the development time used in constructing user interface can be reduced. An experimental implementation of the middleware is also established to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed architecture.