IETF Protocol Suite for the Internet of Things: Overview and Recent Advancements

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a rapidly growing technological domain, and the effort that many standards development organizations (SDOs) and alliances are dedicating to it is constantly increasing. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is certainly one of the most active SDOs operating in this broad domain. With the aim of building a comprehensive, interoperable, and streamlined IoT stack, several IETF working groups are developing protocols in multiple technological domains, which are already very relevant to IoT. This article gives a concise but comprehensive survey of the IETF efforts in IoT. We discuss mainstream standardization and research activities, as well as other IETF-connected support initiatives provided in the context of IoT.