Special-purpose sensor devices--health, medical, mapping, and smart home--are exploding as the Internet of Things (IoT) starts to bloom. This paper presents and defends a unified communication framework, MultiSITCOM, that the authors constructed in order to coordinate the varied protocols and interfaces propagated by sensor vendors. A Samsung S3 and Android were chosen as the convenient, adaptable, and flexible baseline for instantiating the framework.

As you might expect--failure is hardly ever published--MultiSITCOM succeeded in continuously collecting data from eight sensor devices communicating over Bluetooth, ZigBee (via a micro secure digital (SD) ZigBee card), and Wi-Fi. Moreover, central processing unit (CPU) load, memory usage, and battery drain were all exceptionally low, indicating plenty of room for adding more features and management sophistication. The framework is a success.

What’s lost in the particulars of this paper--through no fault of the authors; it’s not their goal--is an overarching concept that should be screamed from the rooftops: Stop with the proprietary devices and protocols! We all have a supercomputer in our pocket that we continually customize to our taste. It is, and foreseeably shall be, our cyber avatar. Let’s standardize now, create frameworks like MultiSITCOM to command/control them, and get on with the IoT revolution.