The Internet of Things is Revolutionary

IoT has a multidisciplinary vision to provide its benefit to several domains such as environmental, industrial, public/private, medical, transportation etc. Different researchers have explained the IoT differently with respect to specific interests and aspects. The potential and power of IoT can be seen in several application domains. Figure 2 illustrates few of the application domains of IoTs potentials.

Fig. 2

Some of the potential application domains of IoT

 

Various important IoT projects have taken charge over the market in last few years. Some of the important IoT projects that have captured most of the market are shown in Fig. 3. In Fig. 3, a global distribution of these IoT projects is shown among American, European and Asia/Pacific region. It can be seen that American continent are contributing more in the health care and smart supply chain projects whereas contribution of European continent is more in the smart city projects.

Fig. 3

Global distribution of IoT projects among America (USA, South America and Canada), Europe and APAC (Asia and Pacific region)

 

Figure 4, illustrates the global market share of IoT projects worldwide. It is evident that industry, smart city, smart energy and smart vehicle based IoT projects have a big market share in comparison to others.

Fig. 4

Global share of IoT projects across the world

 

Smart city is one of the trendy application areas of IoT that incorporates smart homes as well. Smart home consists of IoT enabled home appliances, air-conditioning/heating system, television, audio/video streaming devices, and security systems which are communicating with each other in order to provide best comfort, security and reduced energy consumption. All this communication takes place through IoT based central control unit using Internet. The concept of smart city gained popularity in the last decade and attracted a lot of research activities. The smart home business economy is about to cross the 100 billion dollars by 2022. Smart home does not only provide the in-house comfort but also benefits the house owner in cost cutting in several aspects i.e. low energy consumption will results in comparatively lower electricity bill. Besides smart homes, another category that comes within smart city is smart vehicles. Modern cars are equipped with intelligent devices and sensors that control most of the components from the headlights of the car to the engine. The IoT is committed towards developing a new smart car systems that incorporates wireless communication between car-to-car and car-to-driver to ensure predictive maintenance with comfortable and safe driving experience.

Khajenasiri et al. performed a survey on the IoT solutions for smart energy control to benefit the smart city applications. They stated that at present IoT has been deployed in very few application areas to serve the technology and people. The scope of IoT is very wide and in near future IoT is able to capture almost all application areas. They mentioned that energy saving is one of the important part of the society and IoT can assist in developing a smart energy control system that will save both energy and money. They described an IoT architecture with respect to smart city concept. The authors also discussed that one of the challenging task in achieving this is the immaturity of IoT hardware and software. They suggested that these issues must be resolved to ensure a reliable, efficient and user friendly IoT system.

Alavi et al. addressed the urbanization issue in the cities. The movement of people from rural to urban atmosphere resulting in growing population of the cities. Therefore, there is a need to provide smart solutions for mobility, energy, healthcare and infrastructure. Smart city is one of the important application areas for IoT developers. It explores several issues such as traffic management, air quality management, public safety solutions, smart parking, smart lightning and smart waste collection (Fig. 5). They mentioned that IoT is working hard to tackle these challenging issues. The need for improved smart city infrastructure with growing urbanization has opened the doors for entrepreneurs in the field of smart city technologies. The authors concluded that IoT enabled technology is very important for the development of sustainable smart cities.

Fig. 5

Potential IoT application areas for smart cities

 

Another important issue of IoT that requires attention and a lot of research is security and privacy. Weber focused on these issues and suggested that a private organization availing IoT must incorporate data authentication, access control, resilience to attacks and client privacy into their business activities that would be an additional advantage. Weber suggested that in order to define global security and privacy issues, IoT developers must take into account the geographical limitations of the different countries. A generic framework needs to be designed to fit the global needs in terms of privacy and security. It is highly recommended to investigate and recognize the issues and challenges in privacy and security before developing the full fledge working IoT framework.

Later, Heer et al. came up with a security issue in IP based IoT system. They mentioned that internet is backbone for the communication among devices that takes place in an IoT system. Therefore, security issues in IP based IoT systems are an important concern. In addition, security architecture should be designed considering the life cycle and capabilities of any object in the IoT system. It also includes the involvement of the trusted third party and the security protocols. The security architecture with scalability potential to serve the small-scale to large-scale things in IoT is highly desirable. The study pointed out that IoT gave rise to a new way of communication among several things across the network therefore traditional end to end internet protocol are not able to provide required support to this communication. Therefore, new protocols must be designed considering the translations at the gateways to ensure end-to-end security. Moreover, all the layers responsible for communication has their own security issues and requirements. Therefore, satisfying the requirements for one particular layers will leave the system into a vulnerable state and security should be ensured for all the layers.

Authentication and access control is another issue in IoT that needs promising solutions to strengthen the security. Liu et al. brought up a solution to handle authentication and access control. Authentication is very important to verify the communicating parties to prevent the loss of confidential information. Liu et al. provided an authentication scheme based on Elliptic Curve Cryptosystem and verified it on different security threats i.e. eavesdropping, man-in-the-middle attack, key control and replay attack. They claimed that there proposed schemes are able to provide better authentication and access control in IoT based communication. Later, Kothmayr et al. proposed a two-way authentication scheme based of datagram transport layer security (DTLS) for IoT. The attackers over the internet are always active to steal the secured information. The proposed approach are able to provide message security, integrity, authenticity and confidentiality, memory overhead and end-to-end latency in the IoT based communication network.

Li et al. proposed a dynamic approach for data centric IoT applications with respect to cloud platforms. The need of an appropriate device, software configuration and infrastructure requires efficient solutions to support massive amount of IoT applications that are running on cloud platforms. IoT developers and researchers are actively engaged in developing solutions considering both massive platforms and heterogeneous nature of IoT objects and devices. Olivier et al. explained the concept of software defined networking (SDN) based architecture that performs well even if a well-defined architecture is not available. They proposed that SDN based security architecture is more flexible and efficient for IoT.

Luk et al. stated that the main task of a secure sensor network (SSN) is to provide data privacy, protection from replay attacks and authentication. They discussed two popular SSN services namely TinySec and ZigBee. They mentioned that although both the SSN services are efficient and reliable, however, ZigBee is comparatively provides higher security but consumes high energy whereas TinySec consumes low energy but not as highly secured as ZigBee. They proposed another architecture MiniSec to support high security and low energy consumption and demonstrated its performance for the Telos platform. Yan et al. stated that trust management is an important issue in IoT. Trust management helps people to understand and trust IoT services and applications without worrying about uncertainty issues and risks. They investigated different issues in trust management and discussed its importance with respect to IoT developers and users.

Noura et al. stated the importance of interoperability in IoT as it allows integration of devices, services from different heterogeneous platforms to provide the efficient and reliable service. Several other studies focused on the importance of interoperability and discussed several challenges that interoperability issue is facing in IoT. Kim et al. addressed the issue of climate change and proposed an IoT based ecological monitoring system. They mentioned that existing approaches are time consuming and required a lot of human intervention. Also, a routine visit is required to collect the information from the sensors installed at the site under investigation. Also, some information remained missing which leads to not highly accurate analysis. Therefore, IoT based framework is able to solve this problem and can provide high accuracy in analysis and prediction. Later, Wang et al. shows their concern for domestic waste water treatment. They discussed several deficiencies in the process of waste water treatment and dynamic monitoring system and suggested effective solutions based on IoT. They stated that IoT can be very effective in the waste water treatment and process monitoring.

Agriculture is one of the important domain around the world. Agriculture depends on several factors i.e. geographical, ecological etc. Qiu et al. stated that technology that is being used for ecosystem control is immature with low intelligence level. They mentioned that it could be a good application area for IoT developers and researchers.

Qiu et al. proposed an intelligent monitoring platform framework for facility agriculture ecosystem based on IoT that consists of four layer mechanism to manage the agriculture ecosystem. Each layer is responsible for specific task and together the framework is able to achieve a better ecosystem with reduced human intervention.

Another important concern around the world is climate change due to global warming. Fang et al. introduced an integrated information system (IIS) that integrates IoT, geo-informatics, cloud computing, global positioning system (GPS), geographical information system (GIS) and e-science in order to provide an effective environmental monitoring and control system. They mentioned that the proposed IIS provides improved data collection, analysis and decision making for climate control. Air pollution is another important concern worldwide. Various tools and techniques are available to air quality measures and control. Cheng et al. proposed AirCloud which is a cloud based air quality and monitoring system. They deployed AirCloud and evaluated its performance using 5 months data for the continuous duration of 2 months.

Temglit et al. considered Quality of Service (QoS) as an important challenge and a complex task in evaluation and selection of IoT devices, protocols and services. QoS is very important criteria to attract and gain trust of users towards IoT services and devices. They came up with an interesting distributed QoS selection approach. This approach was based on distributed constraint optimization problem and multi-agent paradigm. Further, the approach was evaluated based on several experiments under realistic distributed environments. Another important aspect of IoT is its applicability to the environmental and agriculture standards. Talavera et al. focused in this direction and presented the fundamental efforts of IoT for agro-industrial and environmental aspects in a survey study. They mentioned that the efforts of IoT in these areas are noticeable. IoT is strengthening the current technology and benefiting the farmers and society. Jara et al. discussed the importance of IoT based monitoring of patients health. They suggested that IoT devices and sensors with the help of internet can assist health monitoring of patients. They also proposed a framework and protocol to achieve their objective. Table 1 provides a summary of the important studies and the direction of research with a comparison of studies on certain evaluation parameters.

Table 1 Comparative illustration of specific research studies on evaluation factors

Research	Major directions of study	Comparison based on evaluation factors
		RT	RL	AV	CT	EC
Zhou et al.	Security and privacy	–	x	–	–	x
Sfar et al.	Architecture, security, and privacy	x	–	x	x	–
Gaona-Garcia et al.	Architecture, security, and privacy	–	–	x		x
Behrendt	Smart city, transport, and healthcare	–	x	–	x	x
Zanella et al.	Smart city, transport and healthcare	x	–	x	–	–
Khajenasiri et al.	Environment, power, and energy	x	–	x	x	x
Alavi et al.	Smart city, transport and healthcare	–	x	–	x
R.H. Weber	Security and privacy	–	x	x	–	x
Heer et al.	Security and privacy		x	–	–	x
Liu et al.	Authentication and identification	x	x	–	x	–
Kothmayr et al.	Security and privacy	–	x	–	–	–
Li et al.	Security and privacy, management and control	–	x	x	x	–
Luk et al.	Security and privacy, architecture	x	x	–	–	–
Sebastian and Ray	Smart city, transport, and healthcare, architecture	x	–	x		x
Yan et al.	Authentication and identification, QoS	x	–	–	–	x
Dierks and Allen	Standardization	x	–	x	–	–
Pei et al.	Standardization, authentication, and identification	–	x	–	–	x
Roman et al.	Security and privacy	x		x	–	–
Noura et al.	Interoperability	–	x		x
Palattella et al.	Interoperability, reliability, scalability	x	–	x	–	x
Yan et al.	QoS, management and control, authentication and identification	–	x	–	x	–
Pereira and Aguiar	Interoperability, QoS, scalability	x	–	x	–	x
Clausen et al.	Data processing, reliability	–	x	x	x	–
Bao et al.	Scalability, security, and privacy	x	x	x	–	–
Li et al.	Security and privacy, reliability	–	x		–	–
Zhang	Security and privacy, data processing	–	x	x	–
Qiu et al.	Agriculture, environmental	x	x	–	–	x
Fang et al.	Environmental	x	x	x	–	–
Montori et al.	Interoperability, reliability	x	x	x	–	x
Distefano et al.	Interoperability, scalability	x	–	–	–	x
Temglit et al.	QoS, reliability	–	x	x	–	–
Talavera et al.	Agriculture, industrial, environmental	x	–	–	x	x