A walkthrough of the emerging IoT paradigm: Visualizing inside functionalities, key features, and open issues

Abstract Internet of Things (IoT) is often envisioned as a paradigm shift from the traditional Internet to a scenario where all the “things” will be connected with the Internet. IoT forced the development of novel IoT standards to bring heterogeneous devices and protocols under one umbrella for the seamless interaction between them. To this end, a plethora of IoT standards and definitions have been proposed over the last decade. However, a common consensus over these standards and definitions is yet to be achieved. Another contemporary issue faced by IoT research community is the absence of a clear functional view of different IoT components working together in a cohesive manner to achieve the envisioned “connect everything” phenomena that serve the bigger objective of gathering the information and processing it for better decision making. Information gathering and processing bring the technologies such as “Cloud Computing” and “Big-Data” into the picture with IoT. In the line of energy efficient data processing, “Fog Computing” was introduced a few years back that is one of the key enablers of the contemporary industrial revolution often termed as “Industry 4.0”. However, there is still a need for a detailed study about how “Cloud computing”, “Big data”, and “Fog computing” fit together and act as building blocks of the much envisioned IoT. In this paper, we study the aforementioned issues in the following manner. First, we cover almost every IoT standard and definition available in the literature and propose an unbiased definition of IoT that takes into consideration the key objectives of various research groups. We also discuss the key components of IoT architecture and propose a functional view of IoT based on Weiser's model and information value loop that helps to specify a clear functionality of various IoT enablers. Following this, a detail discussion on information gathering and processing in IoT is supported by state-of-the-art and contemporary technologies such as Cloud computing and Fog computing respectively. We also propose a new perspective of IoT as social processes and a decentralized multi-agent system in order to address not so obvious future challenges that may arise as the research in IoT proceeds and new application domains are discovered. All in all, this survey provides a birds-eye view for the domain as well as introduce intricacies about the IoT functionality, enabling technologies, challenges, future research trends and directions. In the end, this paper discusses the state-of-the-art and contemporary simulations tools that can be used to implement the IoT based projects. All in all, this paper gives a much wider view of almost every technology related to IoT and its bigger objective of gathering more information and processing it according to the application requirement for better decision making.