IoT Interoperability—On-Demand and Low Latency Transparent Multiprotocol Translator

In the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) there is a clear need for a high level of interoperability between independently developed systems, often from different vendors. Traditional methods of interoperability including protocol gateways and adapters are often used at the network layer. Recent work on application interoperability has emphasized the use of middleware or protocol proxy/gateway. However, middleware tends to move the interoperability problem rather than solving it, and there are scalability issues with increasing the number of proxies, reconfiguration effort, and required bandwidth and processing overheads. This paper proposes a secure, on-demand, and transparent protocol translator for the IIoT. Targeting the challenge of interoperability between Internet protocol-based communication protocols, this paper analyzes current solutions and develops a set of requirements to be met by IoT protocol interoperability. The proposed protocol translator is not a middleware, it is a service-oriented architecture-based participant, it is used on-demand when needed, it does not introduce design time dependencies, it operates transparently, it supports low-latency, and it is secured through the use of Arrowhead authorization and authentication.