Internet of Things Architecture: Recent Advances, Taxonomy, Requirements, and Open Challenges

TLDR

The rapid proliferation of smart devices, wireless technologies, and sensors, projected to reach trillions of connected devices, demands scalable, flexible, interoperable, energy‑efficient, and secure network architectures. This article explores IoT architectures by surveying recent advances, outlining key future requirements, and identifying forthcoming research challenges. The authors investigate recent architectural advances, categorize and classify IoT architectures, devise a taxonomy based on applications, technologies, business objectives, requirements, topologies, and platform types, and delineate essential future requirements. The study presents several prominent IoT case studies.

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed tremendous growth in the number of smart devices, wireless technologies, and sensors. In the foreseeable future, it is expected that trillions of devices will be connected to the Internet. Thus, to accommodate such a voluminous number of devices, scalable, flexible, interoperable, energy-efficient, and secure network architectures are required. This article aims to explore IoT architectures. In this context, first, we investigate, highlight, and report premier research advances made in IoT architecture recently. Then we categorize and classify IoT architectures and devise a taxonomy based on important parameters such as applications, enabling technologies, business objectives, architectural requirements, network topologies, and IoT platform architecture types. We identify and outline the key requirements for future IoT architecture. A few prominent case studies on IoT are discovered and presented. Finally, we enumerate and outline future research challenges.