Physical-Information-Functional Architecture for Internet of Things

Internet of Things (IoT) architecture regulates the compositions and their relationships, which is the core factor determining the performance of IoT. With the development of IoT applications, the types and quantities of devices that need to be integrated are increasing, and the functional requirements are also diverse, thus IoT becomes complex system. However, the existing coarse-grained and single-dimensional IoT architecture is not conducive to accurately model the complex IoT system and brings difficulties to the effective system design. Therefore, considering the energy conversion of each physical entity in the interaction process of IoT, we reasonably think that this energy conversion is displayed through the information system function, and thus find that IoT has three attributes (physics, information, and function). We further design the physical sub-architecture, the information sub-architecture, and the functional sub-architecture. The functional sub-architecture is the external performance of the operation of the information sub-architecture on the physical sub-architecture. On the basis of three sub-architectures, six closed-loop information operation modes have been designed to comprehensively express the working mechanism of IoT in detail. Three sub-architectures constitute the physical-information-functional architecture (also known as five-domains and three-systems architecture) for IoT. The performance evaluation using eight classic IoT architecture indicators shows that the proposed architecture exceeds the existing ones. Finally, by applying the architecture, we have also successfully developed a smart factory industrial IoT as a national intelligent manufacturing demonstration factory.