Web Services for Devices

The WS4D group developed an alternative security profile for DPWS, the WS4D Security Profile. Its purpose is to enable mobile devices – such as smart phones or netbooks – to securely communicate over DPWS. An implementation in alpha state as well as documentation on how to secure your applications is available in the WS4D-gSOAP trunk. The highlights are

• direct authentication between devices (no authentication server, no certificate authorities)
• highly flexible authorization subsystem
• in nearest future: fine-grained configuration of security constraints

Of course, we provide an additional version of the well-known air conditioner example – this time using the security profile’s implementation. Check it out!

On Friday the 26th of November the developer of uDPWS, Christian Lerche, received the “Professor Dr. Werner Petersen”  award 2010 for his master thesis. A main outcome of his master thesis was the uDPWS Stack. Every year, the Werner Petersen award goes to the best master and diploma theses in the north of Germany. The award carries a 1000 Euro prize and is supported by the VDE, the VDI (The Association of German Engineers) and the “Professor Dr. Werner Petersen-Stiftung”. Congratulations!

Christian Lerche

The TeKoMed project evaluates the deployment of Service-oriented Architectures also in medical applications like operating-rooms. DPWS is the core technology, of course. From 23.-24.11. the 2nd TeKoMed workshop was held in Luebeck and the WS4D folk was represented strong there. Main discussions were around security of patients data, which is a significant challenge and a major requirement in medical applications. But also semantic concerns and discussions about moral and ethical issues like the ‘best DPWS framework’ have been raised. So the variety of topics lead to fruitful discussions.
There will be two more workshops of the TeKoMed project so stay tuned and feel free to join!

This years’ ARTEMIS & ITEA Co-Summit, was held at the ICC, International Convention Center, in Ghent, Belgium. And of course WS4D was there presenting their contribution to the OSAMI project. Beside several cool stuff like OSAMI device integration and remote services for OSGi, in Ghent also the WS4D-uDPWS stack was in action. See the small black box below in the pictures with a prototype consisting of an Atmel AVR Raven and a Corscience SpO2 Sensor. On the Raven board WS4D-uDPWS is running providing a DPWS interface for the SpO2 sensor. And yes, this is DPWS over 6LoWPAN!

There is a new research project investigating into security issues of the WS4D technology. Therefore the project will realize a toolkit called WS4Dsec that enables a combined development and verification process for WS4D-enabled devices ensembles.

For more information please visit http://www.ws4dsec.org.

We are happy to announce the release of the newest DPWS stack at WS4D. uDPWS (Micro DPWS) is designed to run on deeply embedded devices with only tens of kB RAM and ROM and thus enables seamless connectivity of deeply embedded devices and resource richer devices. For more information visit the project website at http://code.google.com/p/udpws/.

The new beta 3 of the JMEDS v2.0 framework was released today. The release includes but is not limited to the following new features:

• Support for dynamic generation of local web pages for devices and services (Presentation)
• Basic support for service generation by WSDL
• Support for streaming via attachments (MTOM)

Follow this link to futher information about the JMEDS v2.0 framework.

A new version of the DPWS-Explorer v3 based on the JMEDS framework v2.0 beta 3 was released, too. It features the selection of communication interfaces used for searching devices and services.

All necessary references for quick access:

• Sourceforge Project
• Files for download
• Sourceforge Trac
• Sourceforge SVN
• JMEDS 2.0 API

Most of you may already know the emerging 6LoWPAN (IPv6 over Low power Wireless Personal Area Networks) protocols, pushing IPv6 based communication also down to wireless sensor networks. In the IETF, there are working groups like 6LoWAPP and CORE that are focusing design and development of application layer protocols on top of 6LoWPAN. One approach is of course usage of DPWS ;). There is an Internet-Draft at IETF 6LoWAPP and CORE, discussing this topic of DPWS for 6LoWPAN. So feel free to read the I-D and give feedback!

The First International Workshop on the Web of Things (WoT 2010) this year in Mannheim was held in conjunction with  PerCom 2010. It was a great event with highly fruitful discussions about future smart cooperating objects, characterized by tremendous resource constraints. Nevertheless, the trend towards 6LoWPAN (see http://tools.ietf.org/wg/6lowpan/ and http://www.ipso-alliance.org/) is gaining in momentum. During WoT there were of course also nice presentation about DPWS and WS4D related stuff like the WS4D port for SunSpots. For a complete program overview visit the WoT 2010 website. Let’s hope for a WoT 2011 and many more papers about the cool stuff around DPWS!

There is a port of the WS4D JMEDS Stack for the SunSPOTs. For more information on the port visit http://www.scss.tcd.ie/~grobac.

You don’t know SunSPOTs? Visit http://www.sunspotworld.com/!