Using Open Standards for Utilizing IoT Sensors in a Smart City Scenario

Abstract

Although the use of the Internet of Things (IoT) in a smart city context primarily stems from civilian applications like management and monitoring, there are also other uses. For instance, military forces may utilize sensors during natural disasters, terrorist attacks or insurgent attacks, in order to improve situational awareness. For this to be possible, the military forces must be able to discover the sensors, as well as utilize the data formats of the sensors in their Command and Control (C2) systems. It is therefore necessary to be able to describe the sensors in a standardized and machine-readable way, such that they can be automatically discovered and their capabilities assessed. In this paper, we investigate using open standards such as the OpenAPI Specification (OAS) and Sensor Model Language (SensorML) to enable sensor sharing so that IoT can be leveraged by military forces in an agile and interoperable way, which is necessary to support coalition operations. Furtermore, we have started on a Proof-of-Concept implementation, and in the paper, we present the implementation thus far, as well as the results achieved.