Designing IoT architecture(s): A European perspective

Internet of Things (IoT) domain has attracted a lot of interest over the last few years, to a large extent due to its applicability across a plethora of application domains. This variety of application domains resulted in a variety of requirements that IoT systems should comply with. Due to the heterogeneity of the domains, the requirements varied significantly, and demanding more or less complex systems with varied performance expectations. This situation affected the architecture design and resulted in a range of IoT architectures with not only varied set of components and functionalities, but also varied terminologies used. It resulted in limited interoperability between the systems which in turn hampered development of the complete domain. To address these issues, to ensure a common understanding by providing a framework catering for different applications and eventually enable reuse of the existing work across the domains, reference architectures are an appropriate tool. This paper presents an overview of the activities done in Europe towards definition of such a common framework together with how it is being used and a potential outlook for these efforts.