4. Related Survey Papers

Our taxonomy describes the technologies in the IoT domain and is classified on the basis of architectural layers. We have tried to cover all subareas and recent technologies in our taxonomy. There have been many survey papers on the Internet of Things in the past. Table 1 shows how our survey is different from other highly cited surveys in the literature.

Survey paper Sensors Fog computing Middleware Communication Applications Other
“Internet of Things: A Survey,” Atzori et al., 2010 RFID Not covered Service oriented architecture Communication standards, IEEE 802.15.4, WSN, Zigbee, 6LoWPAN, NFC, Wireless Hart, M2M, EPC global, ROLL routing Smart home, health, logistics, transport, agriculture, social, environment Issues related to security, privacy, naming, addressing
“Internet of Things (IoT): A Vision, Architectural Elements, and Future Directions,” Gubbi et al., 2013 RFID Not covered Service oriented architecture WSN, addressing schemes Personal and home, enterprise, utilities, mobile Cloud centric IoT
“The Internet of Things - A Survey of Topics and Trends,” Whitmore et al., 2014 RFID Not covered Semantic middleware WSN, NFC, WSN Smart infrastructure, health care, supply chains/logistics Security and privacy
Our survey Covered various types of sensors: environmental, medical, neural, chemical, infrared, mobile phone sensors, RFID Fog computing/smart gateway layered architecture of IoT Issues addressed by middleware, types of middleware: event based, service based, semantic, database, application specific All layers of IP stack, protocols, and standards of each layer, IEEE 802.15.4, 6LoWPAN, NFC, ROLL routing, COAP, MQTT, LPWAN, low energy wireless communication technologies: BLE, Zigbee, RFID-WSN integration Smart home, health, logistics, transport, social, environment, agriculture, energy Various architectures of IoT

Table 1 

Comparison with other surveys on the basis of topics covered.


Let us first consider our novel contributions. Our paper looks at each and every layer in the IoT stack, and as a result the presentation is also far more balanced. A novel addition in our survey is that we have discussed different IoT architectures. This has not been discussed in prior surveys on the Internet of Things. The architecture section also considers newer paradigms such as fog computing, which have also hitherto not been considered. Moreover, our survey nicely categorizes technologies based on the architectural layer that they belong to. We have also thoroughly categorized the network layer and tried to consolidate almost all the technologies that are used in IoT systems. Such kind of a thorough categorization and presentation of technologies is novel to the best of our knowledge.

Along with these novel contributions our survey is far more comprehensive, detailed, and exhaustive as compared to other surveys in the area. Most of the other surveys look at only one or two types of sensors, whereas we describe 9 types of sensors with many examples. Other surveys are also fairly restricted when they discuss communication technologies and applications. We have discussed many types of middleware technologies as well. Prior works have not given middleware technologies this level of attention. We cover 10 communication technologies in detail and consider a large variety of applications encompassing smart homes, health care, logistics, transport, agriculture, environment, smart cities, and green energy. No other survey in this area profiles so many technologies, applications, and use cases.