Surfing the Internet-of-Things: Lightweight Access and Control of Wireless Sensor Networks Using Industrial Low Power Protocols Zhengguo Sheng 1,2 , Chunsheng Zhu 2,* and Victor C. M. Leung 2 1 Department of Engineering and Design, University of Sussex, UK 2 Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of British Columbia, Canada Abstract Internet-of-Things (IoT) is emerging to play an important role in the continued advancement of information and communication technologies. To accelerate industrial application developments, the use of web services for networking applications is seen as important in IoT communications. In this paper, we present a RESTful web service architecture for energy-constrained wireless sensor networks (WSNs) to enable remote data collection from sensor devices in WSN nodes. Specifically, we consider both IPv6 protocol support in WSN nodes as well as an integrated gateway solution to allow any Internet clients to access these nodes. We describe the implementation of a prototype system, which demonstrates the proposed RESTful approach to collect sensing data from a WSN. A performance evaluation is presented to illustrate the simplicity and efficiency of our proposed scheme. Received on 02 November 2014 ; accepted on 03 November 2014; published on 09 December 2014 Keywords: Internet-of-things, IPv6, RESTful, wireless sensor netorks Copyright © 2014 Z. Sheng et al., licensed to ICST. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), which permits unlimited use, distribution and reproduction in any medium so long as the original work is properly cited. doi: 10.4108/ inis.1.1.e2 1. Introduction In recent years, the Internet-of-things (IoT) has emerged as an important research focus of both industry and academia. The concept of IoT can be traced back to the pioneering work done by Kevin Ashton in 1999 [1] on using radio frequency identification (RFID) tags in supply chain management. Soon after, this term became popular and is well known as a new type of communication system in which the Internet is extended to the physical world via wireless sensor networks (WSNs) [2]. With the rapid development of IoT technologies in the past few years, a wide range of intelligent and tiny sensing devices have been massively deployed in a variety of vertical applications, and several major ★ This work was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), the NSERC DIVA Strategic Research Network, the ICICS/TELUS People & Planet Friendly Home Initiative at The University of British Columbia, TELUS and other industry partners. * Corresponding author. Email: cszhu@ece.ubc.ca standardization alliances or forums have emerged based on the interests of technology developments and commercial markets. Generally, sensing devices are constrained by limitations in energy resources (battery power), processing and storage capability, radio communication range and reliability, etc., and yet their deployment must satisfy the real-time nature of applications under little or no direct human interactions. Over the past decades, the research community has invested substantial efforts to develop networking systems called WSNs that meet the challenges stated above. With large-scaled deployments of WSNs and their interconnection into the global IoT, a new ecosystem supporting ubiquitous deployment of smart applications has been formed. Technically speaking, current IoT solutions can be categorized as non-IP based or IP based solutions. Most off-the-shelf solutions belong to the former, especially those from some well-known standard alliances, such as ZigBee [3], Z-Wave [4], INSTEON [5] and WAVE2M [6]. However, most of these non-IP solutions are isolated within their own verticals, which hinder the 1 EAI Endorsed Transactions on Industrial Networks and Intelligent Systems Research Article EAI Endorsed Transactions on Industrial Networks and Intelligent Systems 12 2014 | Volume 1 | Issue 1 | e2