Smart Spaces Middleware: A Requirement-Oriented Overview

The progress of Internet of Things (IoT) leads to appearance of diverse networked environments where specific class of service-oriented applications--smart spaces--are becoming developed and deployed. The deployment is based on certain software platforms, widely accepted as smart spaces middleware. This paper overviews this type of middleware with focus on the requirements that the middleware supports in IoT environments. We analyze and systemize the middleware requirements. The systemized requirements are mapped to the particular existing middleware solutions, leading to identification and comparison of basic approaches in the smart spaces development problem.