Babel: A Framework for managing the Heterogeneity of IoT Applications

The world will have more than 50 billions devices connected to the internet in 2020. Most of them will belong to the ”Smart Objects” category. They are part of the Internet of Things world and it becomes fundamental to understand what this new paradigm involves. The IoT will enter our lives comprehensively and silently but bringing about an important change for every one. More and more smart objects will be used by everyone in public spaces, houses or industries. It will be a revolution: the Internet will be not only in devices designed for communication but also in ”everyday objects”. Today the IoT world is fragmented, with a myriad of custom and proprietary solutions. Fragmented does not mean distributed: the IoT, belonging to ”everyday objects” must be dis- tributed but nowadays it is fragmented in communication solutions and in protocols stack. The ”average user” is confused, he/she has to deal with multiple and different technologies, UIs and conventions. Every vendor and producer has a univocal way to develop systems and provide users with services. It is fundamental, for a technology which will become global, to have a sort of standard to conform to. This thesis has the aim to bridge the gap between the IoT and the standardized web tech- nologies. In order to do that it is necessary to create a reliable, neutral and universal middleware which can uniform the description of the smart entities. It is necessary to find a common lan- guage to describe the smart things or, more generally, the smart spaces. The description should be exchanged among different systems without creating confusion and ambiguity. The vehicle for the exchange of information must be a file which can be easily exchanged on the network and parsed rapidly when received. My work analyzes all these requirements and develops a pro- totype to show how it is possible to control the IoT world - which, by definition, is distributed - through a centralized end point.