Architectural Standards for Internet of Things: From Research to Industrial Adaption

Internet of Things integrates sensors, actuators, gateways, cloud and applications to create advanced control systems thereby minimizing human interaction in the system. This technology fuses digital devices into our daily lives, creating a huge social and economic impact thus emerging as a major disruptive technology. An architectural framework used in this technology permits integration of very large number of devices. The architectural necessity is to achieve better interoperability, device management, communication, connectivity, data collection mechanisms, security and scalability. This paper provides a synopsis of various layered and system architectures that have been proposed in literature with some hardware and software elements for the implementation of a complete Internet of Things ecosystem. The paper pattern of introducing conventional architectures with the hardware and software components, strengthen the idea of the architectural requirements of Internet of Things. It further reviews the research perspective and the industrial perspective of implementing Internet of Things architectural reference models. The problem solving approaches of novel research and industrial architectural models such as IoTA, IIRA, WSO2 and CISCO are described and compared on the basis of their architectural descriptions. Finally, it discusses the longevity of the reference architectures to converge to a widely acceptable Internet of Things architectural reference model.