Integrating IoT devices in 3rd-party smart-home ecosystems: local vs remote middleware solutions

The Internet of Things is an especially prominent vector of evolution for commercial applications, including smart-home ecosystems. An IoT ecosystem is an ensemble of web-connected devices able to collect, send and act on environmental data. Individual manufacturers employ proprietary data models to endow their devices with ad-hoc properties, functionalities and relationships. When a 3rd-party ecosystem integration is required in a product, a common language needs to be defined, overarching foreign data models, so that all devices may be interacted with. To address this need, an integrator must use a local or remote middleware, whose deployment affects response times, user functionalities, and maintainability. The former option is less general but incurs less latency; the latter is more versatile, at the cost of higher latency and more complex data exchange. This thesis surveys and compares state-of-the-art integration strategies, and formulates two original solutions.