RAL: a RESTful M2M communications framework for IoT

The idea that we are moving towards a future networked society is widely accepted. The increase of network access, in particular to the Internet, and the wide heterogeneity of devices and components that access the network, and occasionally communicate with each other, pose great design challenges, but at the same time open unprecedent opportunities. In order to be able to fully exploit the new opportunities, a uniform and standardized software architecture must be adopted. The aim is to regulate and organize the multidisciplinary nature of the Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications. In this article we first introduce the REpresentational State Transfer (REST) architecture style as one of the de-facto standards in a totally-IP-connected world. Then the main focus will move to a new M2M RESTful framework for the IoT, developed following the REST paradigm, but enhancing its interface to introduce new web functionalities that are still accessed via the usual interface of the Internet Web sites.