Mobile web and cloud services enabling Internet of Things

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) represents a comprehensive environment that consists of a large number of sensors and mediators interconnecting heterogeneous physical objects to the Internet. IoT applications are prominent in many areas such as smart city, smart workplace, smart plants, smart agriculture and various ubiquitous computing areas. The research roadmap of IoT spans across vast domains such as mobile computing, wireless and sensor networks, service oriented computing, middleware, cloud computing and big data analytics, taking advantage of several recent breakthroughs in the respective domains. Primarily, the challenges associated with realization of IoT scenarios can be summarized across three layers: sensing and smart devices layer, connectivity layer and cloud layer. The first layer deals with the physical objects, including energy-efficient communication of the devices and developing the associated standards so that the interaction among the devices is seamless. The connectivity layer deals with the sensor data acquisition and provisioning, through gateways and sinks. The top cloud layer deals with resource provisioning for storage and processing of the acquired data, in extracting domain specific information. The participation of smart phones both as sensors and the gateways, brings in the scope for mobile web services and mobile cloud services, into this cloud based IoT architecture. The paper takes the cross-layered approach and tries to address the primary challenges of IoT through mobile web and cloud services. The paper also discusses the state of the art of each of the respective research domains along with scope for extensions and recent trends.