In recent years, the Internet of Things (IoT) has attracted attention from many domains. Various automatic and efficient IoT applications are envisioned, such as smart energy management system, smart home, smart logistics. While the IoT connects uniquely identifiable objects to the Internet, users can remotely access the sensing and tasking capabilities of IoT devices. The sensing capability allows users to monitor device status and surrounding environmental properties. And the tasking capability allows users to remotely control IoT devices.

However, different manufacturers produce IoT products with different proprietary protocols. This heterogeneity issue prevents users from accessing different IoT devices with a uniform communication protocol. To address the heterogeneity issue, interoperable IoT standards should be applied. While there have been standards designed for IoT web services (e.g., OGC SensorThings API) and local communication platform (e.g., 6LoWPAN, ZigBee, LoRA), a standard-based end-to-end procedure of deploying and configuring IoT devices is currently missing.

Therefore, in order to achieve the IoT plug-and-play vision, this research first proposes an IoT capability file that can describe the sensing and tasking capabilities of an IoT device, and then designs an automatic registration procedure allowing an IoT device to automatically advertise its capabilities to an IoT web service.

In general, this research focus on defining the communication between IoT devices and a smart gateway that can detect new devices in local networks, understand the capability file, and communicate with web services and devices. To prove the concept, an agriculture monitoring application is designed and developed to monitor in-filed environmental data.