Web Enabled Things Computing System

The rising edge computing paradigm tries to shift some computing tasks from cloud to devices recently, which reduces the computing load of cloud and traffic load of the Internet. The things computing system consists of the devices which are physical world oriented with physical functionalities. It is a great challenge to design a unified system architecture for things computing system because of the system diversity. The architecture of the modern Web system is an efficient solution for the diversity issue. However，due to the resource-constrained feature extending the Web architecture to the things computing system is also very difficult. In this paper, we first introduce the concept of edge computing system and things computing system, and summarize the challenges brought by diversity and resource-constrained features of things computing system. Then, a detailed study of the state-of-the-art technologies, including REST principle, script languages and debugging technique for extending the Web to things computing system, is presented. Most of the related work tried to modify the “Uniform Interface” principle to adapt to edge system. We conclude from the examined literature that things computing system is a massive market, but there is still no unified system architecture which supports both the Web and intelligence. Finally, we present some future research directions for things computing system including the unified system architecture, efficient Web technologies, supporting intelligence and debugging techniques.