This paper was presented at the IEEE World Forum on Internet of Things (WF-IoT), at Seoul, Korea in March, 2014. It proposes a real-time, global approach for discovering physical entities through the Web, by means of the Domain Name System (DNS). Abstract: Sensor technology is becoming pervasive in our everyday lives, measuring the real world around us. The Internet of Things enables sensor devices to become active citizens of the Internet, while the Web of Things envisions interoperability between these devices and their services. An important problem remains the need for discovering these devices and services globally, ad hoc in real-time, within acceptable time delays. Attempting to solve this problem using the existing Internet infrastructure, we explore the exploitation of the Domain Name System (DNS) as a scalable and ubiquitous directory mechanism for embedded devices. We examine the feasibility of this approach by performing a simulation involving up to one million embedded devices, to test system performance and scalability. Finally, we discuss practical issues and the overall potential of this approach.

1. Exploring the Use of DNS as a
Search Engine for the Web of Things
Andreas Kamilaris, Koula Papakonstantinou
and Andreas Pitsillides
World Forum on Internet of Things, Seoul, Korea
6 March 2014

7. Standardized
Global
Flexible
Scalable
Comply with existing
Internet standards
Ubiquitous
to Web users
Not major changes to the
existing technical equipment
and protocols

8. Standardized
Global
Flexible
Users could discover
Scalable
Ubiquitous
environmental services simply
to Web users
by typing related keywords in their
favorite Web browser
Comply with existing
Internet standards
Not major changes to the
existing technical
equipment and protocols

9. Use DNS as a scalable, pervasive, global meta-data
repository for embedded devices, supporting locationbased discovery of Web-enabled physical entities.

10. 1. New top-level domain: .env
2. Device Registration

11. 3. Service Discovery
3a. Listing Services: service.location.env
3b. Selecting Device: sensorid.service.location.env
3c. Translating URL: Map to an IPv4/IPv6 address
3d. Describing Device/Service: WADL (?)
3e. Constructing Request: REST

13. Querying: dig
env.service.location.
env axfr
Registration:
{A, SRV, TXT} DNS
records

14. Service Discovery
1-10 Devices/Zone.
80-100 Devices/Zone.
Each zone represents a service/location pair.
In both cases, 1M sensor devices max.

15. Device Registration
Devices are added sequentially, one-after the other.

16. Storage Requirements

17. Open Issues
Reliability
Consistency
Management
Trust
Privacy
Name conventions
Performance
Security

18. Challenges-Opportunities
Automation
M2M Communication
Personalization
User
preferences, retrieva
l from online social
networks
Generalization
Extension
Env.
ontologies, general
inference, advanced
mashups
Domain vocabularies,
constructing advanced
URLs and queries

19. We only scratched the surface…

20. Thank You!
Andreas Kamilaris
email: camel9@gmail.com