ABSTRACT
All of the objects in the real world are envisioned to be connected and/or represented, through an infrastructure layer, in the virtual world of the Internet, becoming Things with status information. Services are then using the available data from this Internet-of-Things (IoT) for various social and economical benefits which explain its extreme broad usage in very heterogeneous fields. Domain administrations of diverse areas of application developed and deployed their own IoT systems and services following disparate standards and architecture approaches that created a fragmentation of things, infrastructures and services in vertical IoT silos. Coordination and cooperation among IoT systems are the keys to build "smarter" IoT services boosting the benefits magnitude. This article analyses the technical trends of the future IoT world based on the current limitations of the IoT systems and the capability requirements. We propose a hyper-connected IoT framework in which "things" are connected to multiple interdependent services and describe how this framework enables the development of future applications. Moreover, we discuss the major limitations in today's IoT and highlight the required capabilities in the future. We illustrate this global vision with the help of two concrete instances of the hyper-connected IoT in smart cities and autonomous driving scenarios. Finally, we analyse the trends in the number of connected "things" and point out open issues and future challenges. The proposed hyper-connected IoT framework is meant to scale the benefits of IoT from local to global.
ABSTRACT
The Internet-of-Things (IoT) is unanimously identified as one of the main pillars of future smart scenarios. The potential of IoT technologies and deployments has been already demonstrated in a number of different application areas, including transport, energy, safety and healthcare. However, despite the growing number of IoT deployments, the majority of IoT applications tend to be self-contained, thereby forming application silos. A lightweight data centric integration and combination of these silos presents several challenges that still need to be addressed. Indeed, the ability to combine and synthesize data streams and services from diverse IoT platforms and testbeds, holds the promise to increase the potentiality of smart applications in terms of size, scope and targeted business context. In this article, a proof-of-concept implementation that federates two different IoT experimentation facilities by means of semantic-based technologies will be described. The specification and design of the implemented system and information models will be described together with the practical details of the developments carried out and its integration with the existing IoT platforms supporting the aforementioned testbeds. Overall, the system described in this paper demonstrates that it is possible to open new horizons in the development of IoT applications and experiments at a global scale, that transcend the (silo) boundaries of individual deployments, based on the semantic interconnection and interoperability of diverse IoT platforms and testbeds.
