TDLIoT: A topic description language for the internet of things

Abstract

In recent years, the Internet of Things has emerged as an important paradigm that comes with the digitization within all domains. Cheap hardware devices and powerful network connections enable the deployment of a large number of devices equipped with sensors and actuators to enable effective monitoring and management of environments. Famous examples are smart cities or smart factories. Usually, the access and control to sensors and actuators in the IoT is conducted through topics, which originate from the publish-subscribe pattern. Topic consumers can subscribe to these topics or publish information in order to build IoT applications that monitor sensor values or control actuators. However, in large environments, such as smart cities, it is usually not known which topics exist to build applications, and, furthermore, which functionality they provide. In this paper, we introduce the Topic Description Language for the Internet of Things that enables a description of topics. Furthermore, we show how they can be accessed and used. We introduce a real-world scenario in the domain of smart cities to validate the practical feasibility of our approach.