Feature-Driven Domain Analysis of Session Layer Protocols of Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) architecture is defined as a layered structure in which each layer represents a coherent set of services. For supporting the communication among the different IoT entities many different communication protocols are now available in practice. For practitioners, it is often not clear which communication protocol is suitable for the various conditions in which the IoT systems need to be operated. In this paper, we focus on the session layer which is responsible for setting up and taking down of the association between the IoT connection points. We adopt a feature-driven domain analysis whereby we define the common and variant features that are related to communication protocols in the session layer. Based on the resulting feature diagram we explicitly characterize the existing session layer communication protocols. Further we define the criteria for selecting the identified communication protocols for the different conditions.