Zone-Oriented Architecture: An Architectural Style for Smart Web of Everything

After PC Internet and mobile Internet, the world is entering an era of smart Internet (Web) of everything, which is also called the human-cyber-physical ternary computing era. A main feature is that “computers” are not restricted to just PCs or smartphones anymore, but are embodied in the physical world, manifesting as trillions of smart devices. These smart devices will need diverse policies, to satisfy different needs on innovation freedom, security, privacy, governance, and user experience. One set of control policies is unlikely to satisfy the needs of the global smart Web of everything. However, the global smart Web can be divided into zones, each being a zone of control, a zone of rights, and a zone of governance. A zone has its own controlling scope and policies, such as whether the devices in a zone are tethered or tetherless. This paper proposes an architectural style for smart Web of everything, called zone-oriented architecture (ZOA), learning from the experiences of the service-oriented architecture (SOA) and the representational state transfer (REST) style. We present a zone algebra with four operators on zones, a set of three normal forms, and a set of two recommended and three optional architectural constraints. We discuss five problems of the smart Web of everything, use an application scenario to show how ZOA can help, and present open problems for future research.