Network-protocol-based IoT device identification

To help the end-users in the management of their IoT devices and services that they could benefit from, a good solution is to propose a digital assistant that facilitates the usage of their devices, e.g., by recommending some devices for some given IoT services. This digital assistant must be able to identify the capabilities of the IoT devices that are connected to their home networks, which requires to identify the nature of the IoT devices (e.g., category of the device, or even better, manufacturer and model of the device). In this article, we address this issue of IoT device identification, which is a challenge in heterogeneous environment such as IoT. We propose a solution based on several network protocols that can be implemented in the IoT Home network platform Majord'Home. The key idea of our solution is to analyze the messages exchanged by the protocols to extract the relevant information for device nature identification purpose. We show that the solution is effective and offers a good coverage rate of 94% among the set of connected devices tested.