A WoT-Based Method for Creating Digital Sentinel Twins of IoT Devices

• Main Authors: Ivan Lopez-Arevalo, Jose Luis Gonzalez-Compean, Mariana Hinojosa-Tijerina, Cristhian Martinez-Rendon, Raffaele Montella, Jose L. Martinez-Rodriguez
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2021-08-01
• Series: Sensors
• Subjects: digital twins; IoT data; microservices; cloud computing; Web of Things; virtual containers
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/21/16/5531

The data produced by sensors of IoT devices are becoming keystones for organizations to conduct critical decision-making processes. However, delivering information to these processes in real-time represents two challenges for the organizations: the first one is achieving a constant dataflow from IoT to the cloud and the second one is enabling decision-making processes to retrieve data from dataflows in real-time. This paper presents a cloud-based Web of Things method for creating digital twins of IoT devices (named <i>sentinels</i>).The novelty of the proposed approach is that sentinels create an abstract window for decision-making processes to: (a) find data (e.g., properties, events, and data from sensors of IoT devices) or (b) invoke functions (e.g., actions and tasks) from <i>physical devices</i> (<i>PD</i>), as well as from <i>virtual devices</i> (<i>VD</i>). In this approach, the applications and services of decision-making processes deal with sentinels instead of managing complex details associated with the <i>PDs</i>, <i>VDs</i>, and cloud computing infrastructures. A prototype based on the proposed method was implemented to conduct a case study based on a blockchain system for verifying contract violation in sensors used in product transportation logistics. The evaluation showed the effectiveness of sentinels enabling organizations to attain data from IoT sensors and the dataflows used by decision-making processes to convert these data into useful information.