IOtung

IOtung is a proposed open standard for the Internet of Things (IoT) intended to enable interoperable communication between devices, gateways, and cloud services across vendor boundaries. Described as a lightweight, schema-driven framework, IOtung seeks to unify data representation, device capabilities, and event streams while accommodating constrained devices and reliable messaging.

Core concepts: IOtung defines a compact data model for describing devices, their sensors and actuators, and the data types they generate. It uses a publish-subscribe mechanism for message delivery and provides a protocol layer designed for low overhead over UDP, TCP, or WebSocket transports. Security is built into the stack through mutual authentication, encryption, and fine-grained access control.

Architecture: The IOtung stack is organized into three layers: edge devices and gateways that perform local processing; central services or clouds that provide analytics, storage, and orchestration; and governance services that manage identities, policies, and versioning. The design emphasizes offline operation, data caching, and deterministic delivery for critical events.

Adoption and status: IOtung has been discussed in community-specification forums and some research prototypes but has not achieved formal standardization by major standards bodies. Implementations, where present, commonly provide adapters to established IoT protocols such as MQTT, CoAP, and HTTP to support interoperability.

See also: MQTT, CoAP, LwM2M, OCF, IoT security.