Application Of Web Services In IOT Monitoring System

The IoT technology (Internet of Things) has attracted so much attention that many countries, enterprises and scientific research institutions are fixing their attention on it. Based on IoT, developers from many fields can build a variety of monitoring systems. With the deepening and speeding up of the process of informatization, IoT monitoring system appeared in many fields like transportation, agriculture and environment in which IoT technology can play to its strengths. However, IoT monitoring system, usually including several heterogeneous subsystems, may have a strong heterogeneity problem. First, different subsystems may be built under heterogeneous platforms in different programming languages. Second, remarkable difference exists between hardware, data collection systems and database systems, corresponding data from different sides and so on. These problems brought great difficulties to the design and development of the IoT monitoring system.Web Services technology has an inherent ability to build cross-platform, loosely coupled, highly interactive distributed application systems. Apparently it is suitable for solving above problems and, therefore, this paper presents a solution that applies Web services to IoT monitoring system. First, we describe the Internet of Things and Web services technologies and related researches, analyze the advantages of SOA architecture and the pointed out the feasibility and the advantages of this solution. Second, the paper proposes a multi-module design using Web services to make functional abstraction of database subsystem and collection subsystem and publishing services as uniform interface to shield the underlying heterogeneous implementation. Meanwhile, Web services serve as the communication means to complete the system message exchange. Third, we apply the Web Service based solution to IoT based Railway Bridge Monitoring System and show the implementation details of it. The system uses SOAP based Web Services to communicate between client and server, defines own data exchange format and publishes business function as Web Services providing a unified interface for desktop client and shielding the underlying difference between platforms and difference between the database operation and equipment control command.In this paper, through the application of Web service in the IoT Railway Bridge monitoring system, the solution solved the communication of monitoring subsystems between heterogeneous platforms, shielded the heterogeneity among underlying data, different types, different operation and the difference among heterogeneous platforms, which made a good sample for IoT monitoring system development under both Java and. Net platform and achieved good results.