An agent-based hybrid service delivery for coordinating internet of things and 3rd party service providers

When smart embedded devices become widely used in business and industry, many applications and services will emerge in a new Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem. This will initiate new business opportunities in providing these novel applications and services, which integrate efficiently IoT services into business applications. Because IoT takes the reference scenarios further in terms of scale and features offered, it requires the development of suitable, scalable and available service delivery platforms that permit multiple services to coexist between IoT and 3rd party service providers. However, service delivery over IoT infrastructures is a difficult challenge that requires specific new architecture and mechanisms. This paper proposes a system architecture of hybrid service delivery that enables 3rd party service providers to create, deploy, execute, orchestrate, and manage efficiently the running instances of IoT services. In particular, this work focuses on the design and implementation of: agent-based hybrid service exposure, a hybrid service ontology engine crawler, a service enablers container, service-oriented agent lifecycle management, and an agent-mediated service lifecycle coordinator for messages dispatching and transformation between hybrid service exposure and the service enablers container. More specifically, with smart home scenarios, experimental results show that agent-based service delivery approaches could successfully coordinate between IoT and 3rd party service providers.