402 IEEE INTERNET OF THINGS JOURNAL, VOL. 2, NO. 5, OCTOBER 2015
Lightweight Management of Resource-Constrained
Sensor Devices in Internet of Things
Zhengguo Sheng, Member, IEEE, Hao Wang, Changchuan Yin, Senior Member, IEEE, Xiping Hu,
Graduate Student Member, IEEE, Shusen Yang, Member, IEEE, and Victor C. M. Leung, Fellow, IEEE
Abstract—It is predicted that billions of intelligent devices
and networks, such as wireless sensor networks (WSNs), will
not be isolated but connected and integrated with computer
networks in future Internet of Things (IoT). In order to well
maintain those sensor devices, it is often necessary to evolve
devices to function correctly by allowing device management
(DM) entities to remotely monitor and control devices with-
out consuming significant resources. In this paper, we propose
a lightweight RESTful Web service (WS) approach to enable
device management of wireless sensor devices. Specifically, moti-
vated by the recent development of IPv6-based open standards for
accessing wireless resource-constrained networks, we consider to
implement IPv6 over low-power wireless personal area network
(6LoWPAN)/routing protocol for low power and lossy network
(RPL)/constrained application protocol (CoAP) protocols on sen-
sor devices and propose a CoAP-based DM solution to allow easy
access and management of IPv6 sensor devices. By developing a
prototype cloud system, we successfully demonstrate the proposed
solution in efficient and effective management of wireless sensor
devices.
Index Terms—Constrained application protocol (CoAP), device
management (DM), Internet of Things (IoT), IPv6, wireless sensor
networks (WSNs).
I. INTRODUCTION
T
HE CONCEPT of Internet of Things (IoT) can be traced
back to the pioneering work done by Kevin Ashton in
1999 and it is initially linked to the new idea of using RF iden-
tification (RFID) in supply chain [1]. Since recently, this term
became popular and is well known as a new communication
system where the Internet is connected to the physical world via
Manuscript received October 25, 2014; revised February 23, 2015; accepted
March 30, 2015. Date of publication April 06, 2015; date of current version
September 15, 2015. This work was supported in part by the University
of Sussex Start-up Fund, in part by the Canadian Natural Sciences and
Engineering Research (NSERC), in part by the NSERC DIVA Strategic
Research Network, in part by the NSFC under Grant 61271257, and in part
by the China 973 Program under Grant 2012CB315801.
Z. Sheng is with the School of Engineering and Informatics, University of
Sussex, Sussex BN1 9RH, U.K., and also with the Department of Electrical
and Computer Engineering, University of British Columbia, Vancouver,
BC V6T 1Z4, Canada (e-mail: z.sheng@sussex.ac.uk).
H. Wang is with Orange International Labs, Beijing 100190, China (e-mail:
hao.wang@orange.com).
C. Yin is with the Beijing University of Posts and Communications, Beijing
100876, China (e-mail: ccyin@bupt.edu.cn).
X. Hu and V. Leung are with the Department of Electrical and Computer
Engineering, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4, Canada
(e-mail: xipingh@ece.ubc.ca; vleung@ece.ubc.ca).
S. Yang is with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Electronics,
University of Liverpool, Liverpool L69 3BX, U.K. (e-mail: shusen.yang@
liverpool.ac.uk).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/JIOT.2015.2419740
ubiquitous wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Generally, sens-
ing devices are with common features of constrained energy
resources, limited processing capability, vulnerable radio con-
ditions, real-time nature of applications, and no direct human
interaction, etc. By interconnecting sensor devices using low-
cost wireless communication technologies, which is usually
named as WSN, a new ecosystem with a large number of smart
applications has been formed.
With the development of IoT technologies in the past few
years, a number of major standardization alliances are gradu-
ally formed based on their interests in technology selections
and commercial markets. Technically speaking, current IoT
solutions can be categorized as non-Internet protocols (IP)-
based and IP-based solutions. Most of off-the-shelf solutions
belong to the former, especially for some well-known stan-
dard alliances, such as ZigBee [2] and WAVE2M [3] for
office and manufacturing automation, and WirelessHart [4] and
PROFIBUS [5] for real-time industrial control systems, etc.
However, most of these non-IP solutions are isolated within
their own verticals, which hinders the IoT development due to
the incompatible nature across heterogeneous communication
systems.
Motivated by the fact that the transmission control proto-
col (TCP)/IP protocol is the de facto standard for computer
communications in today’s networked world, IP-based solu-
tion could be the future for IoT networks, etc. IP smart object
alliance (IPSO) [6] actively promotes IPv6-embedded devices
for machine-to-machine (M2M) applications. PROFINET, a
promising real-time Ethernet standard, also adapts Ethernet to
the next generation of industrial automation [7]. In order to
tackle the technical challenges, such as extensive protocol over-
heads against memory and computational limitations of sensor
devices, Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)
1
takes the
lead to standardize communication protocols for resource con-
strained devices and develop a number of IP, including IPv6
over low-power wireless personal area networks (6LoWPAN)
[8], routing protocol for low power and lossy network (RPL)
[9], and constrained application protocol (CoAP) [10], etc.
Although a wide range of intelligent and tiny sensing devices
have been massively deployed in a variety of application envi-
ronments, many open challenges remain, which are mostly due
to the complex deployment characteristics of such systems and
the stringent requirements imposed by various services wish-
ing to make use of such complex systems [11]. In order to well
1
The IETF is a large open international community of network design-
ers, operators, vendors, and researchers concerned with the developments and
promotions of Internet standards of the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP).
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