Interoperability in Internet of Things: Taxonomies and Open Challenges

TLDR

The Internet of Things has rapidly expanded, yet proprietary infrastructures, APIs, and data formats create interoperability barriers that hinder large‑scale deployment. This work seeks to enable seamless resource sharing across IoT vendors by surveying and synthesizing efforts from academia, industry, and standardization bodies. The authors conduct a comprehensive survey of existing solutions that facilitate interoperability among heterogeneous IoT platforms. The survey identifies key challenges that must be addressed to achieve effective cross‑platform interoperability.

Abstract

In the last few years, many smart objects found in the physical world are interconnected and communicate through the existing internet infrastructure which creates a global network infrastructure called the Internet of Things (IoT). Research has shown a substantial development of solutions for a wide range of devices and IoT platforms over the past 6-7 years. However, each solution provides its own IoT infrastructure, devices, APIs, and data formats leading to interoperability issues. Such interoperability issues are the consequence of many critical issues such as vendor lock-in, impossibility to develop IoT application exposing cross-platform, and/or cross-domain, difficulty in plugging non-interoperable IoT devices into different IoT platforms, and ultimately prevents the emergence of IoT technology at a large-scale. To enable seamless resource sharing between different IoT vendors, efforts by several academia, industry, and standardization bodies have emerged to help IoT interoperability, i.e., the ability for multiple IoT platforms from different vendors to work together. This paper performs a comprehensive survey on the state-of-the-art solutions for facilitating interoperability between different IoT platforms. Also, the key challenges in this topic is presented.