On the interplay of Internet of Things and Cloud Computing: A systematic mapping study

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a novel paradigm relying on the interaction of smart objects (things) with each other and with physical and/or virtual resources through the Internet. Despite the recent advances that have made IoT a reality, there are several challenges to be addressed towards exploiting its full potential and promoting tangible benefits to society, environment, economy, and individual citizens. Recently, Cloud Computing has been advocated as a promising approach to tackle some of the existing challenges in IoT while leveraging its adoption and bringing new opportunities. With the combination of IoT and Cloud Computing, the cloud becomes an intermediate layer between smart objects and applications that make use of data and resources provided by these objects. On the one hand, IoT can benefit from the almost unlimited resources of Cloud Computing to implement management and composition of services related to smart objects and their provided data. On the other hand, the cloud can benefit from IoT by broadening its operation scope to deal with real-world objects. In spite of this synergy, the literature still lacks of a broad, comprehensive overview on what has been investigated on the integration of IoT and Cloud Computing and what are the open issues to be addressed in future research and development. The goal of this work is to fill this gap by systematically collecting and analyzing studies available in the literature aiming to: (i) obtain a comprehensive understanding on the integration of IoT and Cloud Computing paradigms; (ii) provide an overview of the current state of research on this topic; and (iii) identify important gaps in the existing approaches as well as promising research directions. To achieve this goal, a systematic mapping study was performed covering papers recently published in journals, conferences, and workshops, available at five relevant electronic databases. As a result, 35 studies were selected presenting strategies and solutions on how to integrate IoT and Cloud Computing as well as scenarios, research challenges, and opportunities in this context. Besides confirming the increasing interest on the integration of IoT and Cloud Computing, this paper reports the main outcomes of the performed systematic mapping by both presenting an overview of the state of the art on the investigated topic and shedding light on important challenges and potential directions to future research.