A scalable distributed architecture towards unifying IoT applications

TLDR

The Internet of Things has enabled numerous applications, but interoperability among diverse devices remains a major challenge, prompting the need for a new architecture. This work proposes a distributed, interoperable architecture to facilitate large‑scale IoT deployment. The architecture is layered, providing abstraction levels that handle device heterogeneity, enable seamless addition of new devices, and support scalability and interoperability. A comprehensive study across multiple application domains demonstrates the usability of the proposed architecture.

Abstract

The advent of Internet of Things (IoT) has kindled the possibility of umpteen number of applications. One of the major challenges in the realization of IoT applications is interoperability among various IoT entities. Thus, the need for a new architecture — comprising of smart control and actuation — has been identified by many researchers. In this article, we propose a distributed, interoperable architecture for IoT, which will overcome most of the obstacles in the process of large scale expansion of IoT. It specifically addresses heterogeneity of IoT devices, and enables seamless addition of new devices across applications. We propose a layered architecture that provides various levels of abstraction to tackle the issues such as, scalability, heterogeneity and interoperability. Using a comprehensive study of a use-cases, comprising elements from multiple-application domains, we illustrate the usability of the proposed architecture.