IoT Multiprotocol Interoperability and Legacy Integration

Interoperability enables communications between heterogeneous devices, systems, and services. It is a key to scale up IoT services and domains. Different approaches to achieve interoperability have been researched and implemented. In this chapter, it is classified to four types: device interoperability, network interoperability, platform interoperability, and data interoperability. Device and network interoperability is to enable message exchanges in system level to use agreed protocols. Data interoperability is realized through syntactic and semantic agreement in data format, structures, schema, and models that can be used for understanding context and meaning of the data. Platform interoperability combines both concepts. In the southbound, it provides device and network interoperability while using common syntactics in data representation, and provides tools to enable semantic interoperability for the northbound communications. The needs of data interoperability are increasing but the support of semantic interoperability is not yet insubstantial and IoT interoperability still has several challenges to solve for future work.