Understanding IoT Platforms : Towards a comprehensive definition and main characteristic description

Internet of things (IoT) offers some advanced vertical services through data capture and processing. To provide the services to the end user, some other services such as data analytics, device management, and connection management should be delivered in the IoT ecosystem. IoT platform is the element, which delivers the central process and management, and the vertical services to the end users, by providing some tools, and computation for device management and data lifecycle management (from sensors networks to the end users). Although there are lots of IoT platform products in the market, there is not any unique, precise, or standard definition with the detailed description of IoT platform, which includes various definitions and functionalities of IoT platform from scientific and market perspective, on both cloud and fog computing resources. In this paper, a novel, comprehensive definition for IoT platform and its attributes in Cloud and Fog layer is proposed, which is extracted from scientific definitions in academic papers, the definition, and features for commercial products provided by IoT leader companies, as well as the description of IoT platform in some open source projects.