Syntactic Translation of Message Payloads Between At Least Partially Equivalent Encodings

Recent years have seen a surge of interest in using IoT systems for an increasingly diverse set of applications, with use cases ranging from medicine to mining. Due to the disparate needs of these applications, vendors are adopting a growing number of messaging protocols, encodings and semantics, which result in poor interoperability unless systems are explicitly designed to work together. Key efforts, such as Industry 4.0, put heavy emphasis on being able to compose arbitrary IoT systems to create emergent applications, which makes mitigating this barrier to interoperability a significant objective. In this paper, we present a theoretical method for translating message payloads in transit between endpoints, complementing previous work on protocol translation. The method involves representing and analyzing encoding syntaxes with the aim of identifying the concrete translations that can be performed without risk of syntactic data loss. While the method does not facilitate translation between all possible encodings or semantics, we believe that it could be extended to enable such translation.