Hello
We’ve come into contact with CoAP through the work of some of the research institutes working with IoT where in Sweden (SICS, SUST). They use it as a lightweight replacement of an HTTP server in embedded devices with very small RAM. A question arose if one could use CoAP over XMPP in some way... The problem as we saw it was that this approach didn’t really solve any of the problems of communicating with devices (i.e. understanding different devices), and only solved the problem of transporting telegrams over gateways. You still had to know the proprietary protocols of each device. (CoAP has been said to be “just another protocol” in this sense.)
Another approach we’ve looked into is EXI. It is also very efficient and requires very little RAM, but permits the flexibility of XML and extensions. There are tools for creating C code from XML Schema files directly, so implementation is quick, straightforward, battery & memory efficient, while still maintaining the flexibility of XML. In this case, you could create XMPP extensions with schemas for sensor data, control data and common AMR/AMI tasks for communicating with devices at a higher level, not forcing each device to know the protocols of each other. If this could be done, XMPP could be used, not only as a transport mechanism, but an interoperability platform for IoT. Devices adhereing to such extensions could be interchanged in systems, making it an interesting platforms for operators of AMR/AMI systems.
Sincerely,
Peter Waher
PS: If anybody is interested in working with IoT or AMR using XMPP & EXI, we may be interested in joining.
Clayster provides systems and technology for AMR/AMI/IoT/Semantic Web
Peter Saint-Andre stpeter at stpeter.im
Sat Apr 7 01:53:48 UTC 2012
Have folks here looked into CoAP, the Constrained Application Protocol?