VSDM: A Virtual Service Device Management Scheme for UPnP-Based IoT Networks

The ubiquitous nature of IoT devices has brought new and exciting applications in computing and communication paradigms. Due to its ability to enable auto-configurable communication between IoT devices, pervasive applications, and remote clients, the use of the Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) protocol is widespread. However, the advertisement and discovery mechanism of UPnP incurs significant overhead on resource-constrained IoT devices. In this paper, we propose a delegation-based approach that extends the UPnP protocol by offloading the service advertisement and discovery-related overhead from resource-limited IoT devices to the resource-rich neighbours of a UPnP-enabled IoT network. Our experimental evaluations demonstrate that the proposed scheme shows significant improvement over the basic UPnP, reducing energy consumption and network overhead.