Interworking between Modbus and Internet of Things platform for industrial services

In the era of rapid development of Internet of Things (IoT), numerous machine-to-machine technologies have been applied to the industrial domain. Due to the divergence of IoT solutions, the industry is faced with a need to apply various technologies for automation and control. This fact leads to a demand for an establishing interworking mechanism which would allow smooth interoperability between heterogeneous devices. One of the major protocols widely used today in industrial electronic devices is Modbus. However, data generated by Modbus devices cannot be understood by IoT applications using different protocols, so it should be applied in a couple with an IoT service layer platform. oneM2M, a global IoT standard, can play the role of interconnecting various protocols, as it provides flexible tools suitable for building an interworking framework for industrial services. Therefore, in this paper, we propose an interworking architecture between devices working on the Modbus protocol and an IoT platform implemented based on oneM2M standards. In the proposed architecture, we introduce the way to model Modbus data as oneM2M resources, rules to map them to each other, procedures required to establish interoperable communication, and optimization methods for this architecture. We analyze our solution and provide an evaluation by implementing it based on a solar power management use case. The results demonstrate that our model is feasible and can be applied to real case scenarios.