SANAD: A Comprehensive IoT Reference Architecture for Integrated Enterprise Platforms

Many IoT platforms have been introduced to simplify the delivery of IoT services by isolating organizations from the details of the IoT services delivery. Hence, the choice of the right IoT platform becomes a critical high-risk decision for any organization, as replacing it costs tremendously in terms of money and time. Such choice becomes harder as the number of produced IoT platforms is getting larger by the day. To facilitate this choice, many works proposed different reference architectures to compare and analyze existing IoT platforms; based on their key functionalities and not their low-level specifications. Unfortunately, existing reference architectures vary from one another as they focus on different layers and different applications, which makes it harder to compare IoT platforms. To overcome this problem, this paper proposes SANAD as a comprehensive IoT reference architecture for integrated enterprise platforms that can be used for different application domains. SANAD aggregates all layers from existing major references architectures and adds the necessary components required for integrated enterprise architectures. A comparison of SANAD against existing IoT reference architectures is provided. Also, a comparison among major IoT platforms using SANAD is provided to validate SANAD adoption.