PalCom MIST: A Metaprotocol for Internet Systems of Things

Future applications of internet of things (IoT) will go far beyond connecting sensors to the internet. The real challenge lies in how to easily build well working systems of things: well integrated distributed applications that support users, yet built from a variety of devices running on a variety of networks and protocols, and including services that were not designed to interoperate. Based on our experiences from more than a decade of experimentation with heterogeneous, distributed systems, we identify a number of key requirements for building such systems of IoT: transparent communication and routing over heterogeneous networks, interoperability across standards, scalable evolvable architecture, and high-level development. We present a scenario from healthcare, instantiating these general requirements, and we explain how they are supported by our middleware PalCom which is an implementation of the MIST architecture, a Metaprotocol for Internet Systems of Things. We discuss how the constituents of the MIST architecture contribute to each of the identified requirements.