Towards Web of Things Middleware: A Systematic Review

Advancements of the Web technology provide this opportunity for Internet of Things (IoT) to take steps towards Web of Things (WoT). By increasing trend of reusing Web techniques to create a monolithic environment to control, monitor, and compose the smart objects, a mature WoT architecture is finally emerged in four layers to be a solution for IoT-middleware. Although WoT architecture facilitates addressing requirements of IoT in architectural or service aspects, but the effectiveness of this solution is indeterminate to meet IoT-middleware objectives. The most surveys and related reviews in this field just investigate IoT-middleware and WoT separately and thereby, report some new technologies or protocols on various middlewares or WoT models. In this paper a comprehensive survey is proposed on common area of IoT and WoT disciplines by leveraging Systematic Literature Review (SLR) as research methodology. This survey classifies variant types of IoT-middleware and WoT architecture to specifies their requirements and characteristics, respectively. Hence, WoT requirements could be categorized by comparing and analyzing IoT-middleware requirements and WoT characteristics. This research heavily reviews existing academic and industrial contributions to select potential platforms (or frameworks) and assess them against proposed WoT requirements. As a result of this survey, strengths and weaknesses of WoT architecture, as a IoT-middleware, are presented. Finally, this research attempts to open new horizon for the WoT architecture to enable researchers to dig role of WoT technologies in the IoT.