Handling the internet of things with care

This paper describes how the use of Identifiers with an appropriate system of identifier storage, registration and identifier resolution can greatly extend the flexibility of a system dealing with IoT. The features of the CNRI Handle system are shown to match well the requirements of such a IoT system. In addition to strong technical advantages, the system allows the separation of mechanisms for the management of IoT objects and processes from those of their network addresses – though the two are tied together by the identifier attributes. This in turn eases both the orchestration of independent applications and devices, and the independent usage of the same network end-point from different stakeholders – while the different applications can be managed separately. We have validated our thesis, by applying the system to a smart office environment, and shown how the properties of the IoT devices can be stored securely in a Handle repository including the characteristics of the device, network addresses and security attributes.