Context-aware location in the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things is rapidly diffusing, though severe modifications are needed to the current Internet architecture to cope with its new requirements. A major step forward is decoupling the name of an object (identifier) from its physical location (locator), which are both expressed by the IP address currently. We argue that additional advantages can be brought if context metadata are provided along with the locator, thus forming an enriched locator. In this work, we propose an efficient architecture that allows the enriched locators to be distributed efficiently and in a scalable manner. The distribution protocol exploits the multiple Distributed Hash Table concept, which is well established in peer-to-peer overlays. Preliminary evaluation results obtained with a practical testbed implemented are reported.