Amount of different devices (sensor nodes) interacting in an IOT environment is big. These devices must be able to connect to each other despite their different network technologies. Furthermore, the devices also require service discovery procedures as well as means to enforce semantic compatibility between devices. These requirement create a demand for a software layer that can become a proxy which help to bridge between these devices. Otherwise it would become too costly to manually configure each devices on its own. For example, a research group (Plasma Group) lead by Giancarlo Fortino from University of Calabria develop SPINE, a software framework for designing and prototyping wireless sensor network applications. SPINE enables efficient implementations of signal processing algorithms for analysis and classification of sensor data through libraries of processing functionalities. It also embed an application-level communication protocol [1].
[1] SPINE, “SPINE at a Glance,” 2012, http://spine.deis.unical.it/index.html [accessed on: 2014-03-17].