A Survey on Unified Modeling under Identification Exploding Tendency in the Internet of Things

The prevalence and large-scale uptake of the Internet of Things (IoT) have led to a growing trend of Identification Exploding, namely heterogeneous entities respectively identified to provide convenient intelligent services. To address challenges under Identification Exploding, unified modeling has become a promising approach to generalizing identification for heterogeneous entities in IoT. This paper surveys and discusses Identification Exploding's background to explore the possibility of unified modeling as one of the solutions. Meanwhile, challenges of realizing unified modeling are discussed. After that, comprehensive reviews on the latest modeling approaches and methods covering various IoT entities are carried out, including sensed entities and sensing devices. Special attention has been paid to modeling under resource-constrained IoT environments and relevant modeling-based industry solutions with critical analysis. It is proved that unified modeling is extremely significant under Identification Exploding Tendency in the IoT era.