A systems of systems perspective on the internet of things

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to extending the reach of the Internet into the physical world. The realization of IoT applications involves the integrated operation of many subsystems that retain their private function. This makes IoT application deployment and integration a Systems of Systems (SoS) problem. In this paper we collect SoS properties and characteristics from the literature in order to understand common integration problems in IoT better, for which we use two running examples. We show that in particular for safety critical systems there must be means to compute and predict integrated behavior based on specifications at interfaces. We give a general coordination architecture that supports this.