Plug and play reconfigurable solutions for heterogeneous IoT

The world is rapidly developing into a networked society, where people, machines, data, services and applications are tightly integrated by means of information and communications technology. The members of this dynamic machine-human community possess different, and even unique, capabilities. This development requires solutions to support the unprecedented level of the system's pervasion and heterogeneity, solutions which are missing today. Today’s device-level design procedures are an obstacle in the transition to this heterogeneous future, which demands diverse Internet of Things (IoT) devices, including low-end and low-power ones. Reducing the design and production costs of devices in low to mid-scale production quantities, requires new approaches to cope with application versatility. To address this problem, this thesis proposes a novel wireless sensor and actuator network (WSAN)/IoT device design methodology based on the combination of two approaches: platformbased design and autoconfiguration, that are applied to hardware (HW) and software (SW) components. Unlike the state-of-the-art methodologies, the methodology proposed enables more flexibility both during the design and after device deployment, while reducing the development expenses and time-to-market. Although neither of the two these approaches is fundamentally novel on its own, in this thesis they are employed in, and adapted to, extremely resource restricted systems. The feasibility of the methodology is shown by the development of technology artifact representing a Plug-and-Play enabled WSAN/IoT device platform. The new devices are assembled from HW modules, encapsulating the various power supply, processing, transceiver, sensor and actuator units, or sets of those. The central control unit of a device automatically identifies the HW, and configures the SW accordingly. The technology enablers for this the HW and SW architectures and interfaces – are reported in this thesis. Experimentation confirms the viability of the proposed concepts and mechanisms. The utility of the designed solutions has been shown by a series of successful research projects and experimental results.