Geographic Service Discovery for the Internet of Things

Abstract

In the Internet of Things vision, physical things become part of the Internet and, . as a result, the Internet extends into the physical world. Applications start to be aware of the users’ environment and users can have mediated interactions with the physical world through the Internet of Things. Within the physical world, the spatial structure, which can be described by geographical coordinates, is relevant for finding services. Thus geographic service discovery becomes a core part of an Internet of Things infrastructure. The key problem to solve is how to efficiently extract the set of services whose geographic service area overlaps with the geographic scope of the request from the potentially huge number of services in the Internet of Things.

In this paper, we investigate the use of spatial indexes for the efficient discovery of services within an area specified by geographic coordinates. An experimental evaluation based on a prototype implementation demonstrates the feasibility of the approach by measuring the performance with respect to the request throughput under varying parameter settings and configurations.