A lightweight data interchange format for internet of things with applications in the PalCom middleware framework

Abstract

We present the PalCom Object Notation, a textual data representation format for communication between internet of things which support binary and textual data. The format does not require parsing of user data (or the “payload”) and is thus efficient to use also for large binary values such as digital images, audio and video as well as for short textual values. These can be mixed in the same messages and thus transported over the same communication link. Its structure is influenced by JSON, making it easy to translate between the two formats. We show how it fits seamlessly into the common situation with JavaScript on a client side and Java on a server side, combined by a HTTP-server. The performance evaluation shows that the size of the representation and the time needed to generate and parse it is comparable to that of JSON for small data sizes, but becomes both smaller than JSON and faster to process as data sizes grows, and can yield a tenfold performance increase for binary payloads.