Chatty Things - Making the Internet of Things Readily Usable for the Masses with XMPP

An important challenge for the Internet of Things is the gap between scientific environments and real life deployments. Smart objects need to be accessible and usable by ordinary users through familiar software and access technologies to facilitate any interaction and to increase their acceptance rate. This work deals with a seamless integration, discovery, and employment of smart objects into the Internet infrastructure under Human-to-Machine (H2M) communication aspects. We introduce an XMPP-based service provisioning sublayer for the IoT to integrate resource constrained devices seamlessly into the Internet by showing how XMPP can empower the collaboration between humans and smart objects. To meet the requirements of constrained devices, we propose to extend XMPP's publish-subscribe capabilities with a topic-based filter mechanism to effectively reduce the number of exchanged XMPP messages. We further present standardized bootstrapping and handling processes for smart objects that adapt automatically to infrastructure and ad hoc network environments and do not require predefined parameters or user interaction. The applicability of XMPP for constrained devices is further demonstrated with an XMPP client and mDNS/DNS-SD service for the Contiki operating system.