Cross-platform Web of Things framework for smart home sensors and legacy device gateways

Abstract

The Web of Things (WoT) aims to enable universal interoperability across a wide range of Internet of Things (IoT) platforms and devices by leveraging conventional web technologies. Still, most current WoT solutions rely on high-level programming languages like Python and JavaScript; as a result, they are generally incompatible with IoT sensors that have limited resources. To address this restriction, this paper presents WoTC++, a native, lightweight, cross-platform, modular WoT stack built in C++. The proposed system consists of a portable WoT core, libraries for binding to protocol interfaces, and device drivers, enabling real-time interactions on resource-constrained devices. The framework is built on the W3C specifications and Internet protocols and can be integrated into any Ethernet or Wi-Fi-enabled platform. The main contribution of the suggested system is a cross-platform, configurable WoT core compatible with all platforms and providing flexible integration with platform network drivers. The suggested framework has been evaluated with an ESP32 IoT sensor and a gateway for the Zigbee legacy protocol running on a Raspberry Pi. Compared with alternative runtimes, the suggested framework shows encouraging performance across all workloads in benchmarking tests against other interpreted-language implementations. Overall, the findings support the scalability, real-time capabilities, effective protocol bindings (HTTP, CoAP), and cross-device interoperability of the suggested framework in limited environments. The foundation for a future Web of Things is laid by this gateway design, which provides a smooth interface to legacy protocols such as Thread, Z-Wave, and Zigbee.