The space broker: a middleware for mediating interactions in smart IoT spaces

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a major technological development likely to have a profound effect on all aspects of society. Among other things, it promises smooth and personalized interactions between people and the spaces they inhabit and visit. Unfortunately, we are not yet at the point of interacting with smart spaces per se; rather, we simply interact with collections of devices having different interfaces, offered by different manufacturers, living in different administrative domains, and using different apps. The research reported in this paper promises to take us a step closer to achieving the personalized interaction modalities the IoT technology is capable of offering. The starting point is to reimagine the smart space as being defined by spatial characteristics (e.g., illumination, security, temperature, etc.) with most devices receding from the user's explicit awareness. Users can specify their needs from the environment in terms of the abstract characteristics. Key to accomplishing this is the introduction of the concept of the Space Broker, a software agent that manages available devices so as to meet user requirements expressed in terms of spatial characteristics.