A Gateway for the Generic Conversion of Protocols for Smart Meters and IoT Applications

In the recent years the number of Internet of things (IoT) devices have increased in a remarkable way. Due to this increase of devices many challenges have appeared. One of the most markable challenge is interoperability challenge, where devices use different standards, protocols and conventions to exchange information. This challenge has appeared because of the different devices’ specifications and the different manufacturers of the different types of IoT devices. The current thesis proposes a generic API that can be used for communication with different IoT devices, which use different conventions and protocols; understanding the underlying conventions or protocols used. In this thesis, we used smart meters as the IoT devices for testing the generic API. The generic API is first described in an abstract way; then we describe the Java binding in order to use the API with the Java programming language. The implemented generic API enables developers to communicate with different IoT devices without the need of knowing the specification of each protocol. The current thesis can be considered as an important point of extending the research field of interoperability of IoT devices. Furthermore, the generic API can be extended in order to support other types of protocols and conventions.