Semantic-Driven Protocol Adaptation for Interoperable IoT and Web Systems

Benomar et al. (2024) highlight the persistent interoperability challenge in IoT, where diverse protocols (MQTT, CoAP, AMQP, HTTP) create barriers. Current solutions often focus on static gateways or RESTful wrappers. This research proposes a more intelligent, semantic-driven middleware that can, at runtime, understand the capabilities, constraints, and intents of devices and services—using ontologies and AI planning—to select or adapt protocols and data flows. For example, it could automatically switch to a privacy-preserving protocol for sensitive data, optimize for bandwidth in constrained environments, or translate between protocol paradigms (publish/subscribe vs. request/response) as needed. This builds on the “semantic web” vision but operationalizes it at the protocol level, enabling seamless, policy-driven, and performance-optimized interoperability. Such an approach promises to radically simplify and scale IoT/Web integration, making cross-domain applications more robust, secure, and future-proof.

References:

1. Bridging IoT Protocols with the Web of Things: A Path to Enhanced Interoperability. Zakaria Benomar, Marco Garofalo, Nikolaos Georgantas, F. Longo, Giovanni Merlino, A. Puliafito (2024). 2024 IEEE International Conferences on Internet of Things (iThings) and IEEE Green Computing & Communications (GreenCom) and IEEE Cyber, Physical & Social Computing (CPSCom) and IEEE Smart Data (SmartData) and IEEE Congress on Cybermatics.