Scalable Personalized IoT Networks

The Internet of Things (IoT) has enabled unprecedented interactions with our physical world, with the aim to deliver a wide range of customizable services in many domains. With recent advancements in IoT technology, users are increasingly expecting these services to be intelligent and context aware. Nevertheless, there is still no framework capable of delivering personalized IoT services on a large scale. For such a framework to be conceived, it is likely that technologies from many domains have to be utilized. This paper examines the readiness of the leading state-of-the-art technologies in several key fields for realizing the goal of a truly scalable and personalized IoT experience. We discuss the important requirements and challenges for realizing this goal. Then, we identify the major approaches that can contribute to this goal and categorize them into: technologies for adaptive personalized sensing, scalable solutions for user-centric networking, and intelligence techniques that leverage context awareness and adaptability at the application and system levels. In the first category, our discussion centers around virtualization and reprogrammability at the sensing layer. In the second category, we investigate the readiness of Fog computing and information-centric networking to develop scalable personalized IoT infrastructures. These approaches were chosen for their combined ability to match dynamic user requirements with available system resources, while guaranteeing overall efficient utilization. Finally, in the third category, we examine context awareness, reasoning, and machine learning techniques as well as semantic technologies for realizing proactive and adaptive intelligent IoT systems and applications. This paper offers a focused discussion of the key topics that drive the research in the important and timely topic of scalable and personalized IoT networks.