Middleware for the Internet of Things
The Future Internet enables us to have an immediate access to information about the physical world and its objects. As such, Internet of Things (IoT) has been introduced to integrate the virtual world of information and the real world of devices. Internet of Things covers the infrastructure, which can be hardware, software and services, to support the networking of physical objects. IoT aims to provide a simple interaction between the physical world and the virtual world, by integrating a large numbers of real-world physical devices (or things) into the Internet.
IoT has increasingly gained attention in industry to interact with different types of devices. This popularity cause a demand to use IoT vision for different types of device. While each type of devices can support its own communication protocol and required data to provide data for each interaction. This heterogeneous device interaction cause difficulties to interact with the devices to gather information from the environment. The solution that has introduced in the literatures is defining a middleware layer between the devices and the user of the IoT- based system.
In this research, we investigate on developing a middleware for an IoT-based system like video Monitoring System (VMS), to facilitate configuration and deployment for non-expert end-users. A VMS is responsible to provide full video coverage to monitor an area for an end-user, such as a guard. The configuration and deployment can be facilitated by providing a homogeneous Graphical User Interface to interact with different types of camera in a uniform way.
A VMS must support the technical details of different types of cameras. However, these variations should be hidden from non-expert end-users. Thus, we extract a model from the required features to configure different types of cameras. In this project, we developed a VMS that consist of a Middleware for video Monitoring System (MVMS) and applications, which run on top of the middleware. Our VMS let non-experts end-users configure cameras through communicating with third-party camera service providers which is responsible to apply end- users configuration on cameras.
To evaluate our VMS to achieve the ease of configuration and deployment for non-expert end-users, we developed a prototype and interview with the practitioners in a company which has developed VMS.