Abstract
In the last few years, many smart objects found in the physical world are interconnected and communicate through the existing internet infrastructure which creates a global network infrastructure called the Internet of Things (IoT). Research has shown a substantial development of solutions for a wide range of devices and IoT platforms over the past 6-7 years. However, each solution provides its own IoT infrastructure, devices, APIs, and data formats leading to interoperability issues. Such interoperability issues are the consequence of many critical issues such as vendor lock-in, impossibility to develop IoT application exposing cross-platform, and/or cross-domain, difficulty in plugging non-interoperable IoT devices into different IoT platforms, and ultimately prevents the emergence of IoT technology at a large-scale. To enable seamless resource sharing between different IoT vendors, efforts by several academia, industry, and standardization bodies have emerged to help IoT interoperability, i.e., the ability for multiple IoT platforms from different vendors to work together. This paper performs a comprehensive survey on the state-of-the-art solutions for facilitating interoperability between different IoT platforms. Also, the key challenges in this topic is presented.
Highlights
The term Internet of Things (IoT), first coined by Kevin Ashton around 1999 [1], has recently been an emerging technology in a broad range of domains
We provide an overview of the different interoperability handling approaches for addressing interoperability challenges in IoT
This consists of an upper layer with servers providing developers with the necessary APIs for IoT applications, a middle layer, which contains a distributed network operating systems (OSs), commanding several physically distributed Software-defined networking (SDN) controllers, a south layer, which contains the SDN-enabled network switches, and the IoT gateway, which connects them to the middle layer
Summary
The term Internet of Things (IoT), first coined by Kevin Ashton around 1999 [1], has recently been an emerging technology in a broad range of domains. The European Union has recently funded several research projects under the H2020 program focusing on the federation of IoT platforms It may take a long time before the related standards are fully agreed upon and accepted, if ever. To resolve this issue, researchers in both academia and industry have been developing a list of innovative solutions for interoperability and heterogeneity in different IoT systems. The associated challenges, such as addressing and networking, heterogeneity, context awareness, resource discovery, security and privacy issues have been introduced. We provide an overview of the open issues and potential future research directions in IoT interoperability
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