The Internet of Things and Architectures of Big Data Analytics: Challenges of Intersection at Different Domains

The current exponential advancements in the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies pave a vast intelligent computing platform by integrating smart objects with sensing, processing and communication capabilities. The core element of IoT is the complex big data generated from different interconnected sources at real-time, presenting divergent processing and analysis challenges. Best practices in software engineering have been continuously addressed in IoT technologies to handle such big data efficiently at different domains. Despite of the massive studies dedicated for IoT, no explicit processing architecture is proposed based on real investigation of software engineering concepts and big data analytics characteristics in IoT. This paper provides a systematic literature review for the current state-of-the-art of IoT systems in different domains. The study investigates the current techniques and technologies that serve IoT systems from the big data analytics and software engineering perspectives, revealing a matrix for the specific IoT data features and their encountered challenges and gaps for each domain. The review deduces a proposed domain-independent software architecture for big IoT data analytics, maintaining various IoT data processing challenges, including data scalability, timeliness, heterogeneity, inconsistency, confidentiality and correlations. Finally, the main research gaps are emphasized for future considerations.