[Manageable Affordances TF] Local Device Discovery

[egekorkan]

Title: Local Device Discovery

Submitter(s):

Ege Korkan

Motivation:

In a local network with WoT devices, it is important to discover them and present them back to the user in the form of TDs. The users can then create Consumer scripts to interact with them.

Expected Participating Entities:

• Gateway where the discovery process runs
• User (Discoverer) who starts the discovery process
• Things in a network

Workflow:

1. User (Discoverer) starts a discover action.
2. The gateway does multiple mechanisms like DNS and protocol-specific mechanisms.
3. Discovered Things' TDs become available in the gateway as a property affordance.

Related Use Cases (if any):

None

Existing solutions:

sayWoT implementation from Siemens does this

Identified Requirements by the TF:

To be filled after submission. Examples of requirements include usage of specific communication protocols, media types, platforms, security and privacy mechanisms, or accesibility.

Comments:

This is not the classic introduction mechanisms of the WoT Discovery spec but it is similar in some ways.

[benfrancis]

In terms of existing implementations, WebThings Gateway does this too.

Although they are not yet exposed in the gateway's own Thing Description, the gateway exposes two actions:

• pair (with a timeout length as an input) - Tells add-on adapters to start searching for local devices
• unpair (with a thing ID as an input) - Tells an add-on adapter to start the unpairing process for a particular device

The pair action can be cancelled at any time through the gateway's user interface.