Middleware for Internet of Things: A Survey

TLDR

The Internet of Things envisions ubiquitous connectivity of diverse physical objects, creating ultra‑large‑scale, heterogeneous networks that pose significant development challenges, which middleware can mitigate by integrating devices and enabling interoperability. This survey aims to define requirements for IoT middleware and evaluate existing solutions against those requirements, while highlighting open research issues and future directions. The authors conduct a comprehensive review of current IoT middleware, mapping each solution to the proposed requirements and discussing gaps and challenges.

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) envisages a future in which digital and physical things or objects (e.g., smartphones, TVs, cars) can be connected by means of suitable information and communication technologies, to enable a range of applications and services. The IoT's characteristics, including an ultra-large-scale network of things, device and network level heterogeneity, and large numbers of events generated spontaneously by these things, will make development of the diverse applications and services a very challenging task. In general, middleware can ease a development process by integrating heterogeneous computing and communications devices, and supporting interoperability within the diverse applications and services. Recently, there have been a number of proposals for IoT middleware. These proposals mostly addressed wireless sensor networks (WSNs), a key component of IoT, but do not consider RF identification (RFID), machine-to-machine (M2M) communications, and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA), other three core elements in the IoT vision. In this paper, we outline a set of requirements for IoT middleware, and present a comprehensive review of the existing middleware solutions against those requirements. In addition, open research issues, challenges, and future research directions are highlighted.