The IoT Vision: Challenges and Research Gaps

Introduction

The Internet of Things (IoT) envisions self-controlled and decentralized environments, in which hardware devices, equipped with sensors and actuators, communicate with each other through standardized internet protocols to reach common goals (Vermesan and Friess, 2013). Sensors and actuators of the devices measure or alter the physical properties of the environment (Gubbi et al., 2013). IoT applications can revolutionize many areas of people’s lives, including home, work, traveling, and health (Abdel-Basset et al., 2019). A current example is the app that is used to track contacts during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic (Abeler et al., 2020). However, creating self-controlled IoT applications is a great challenge, which requires consideration of many different aspects, e.g., security, privacy, efficiency, robustness, network communication, standards, and many more. Hence, many different re-search areas need to work together – solving different challenges – to create holistic approaches for building IoT applications. Since this is not yet fully achieved, in current IoT applications, the human user is still the core actor and has to make most of the decisions. In the IoT, how-ever, devices should work together to make such decisions themselves. An example for an IoT application, which should work autonomously regarding decision making, is a factory, in which self-driving transport vehicles (the devices) communicate with each other to reach a common goal, transporting goods from one destination to another without collisions, damaging the goods and by interacting with their environment, e.g., to open a closed gate. Figure 1 depicts an exemplary scenario, in which self-driving transport vehicles load a truck.

Figure 1.

Example Internet of Things application with self-driving transport vehicles loading a truck

To achieve this goal, a reliable communication between the vehicles, real-time collision detection, and high accuracy are of vital importance. Furthermore, security and safety need to be considered at all times. This scenario shows how even such a simple IoT scenario leads to a large variety of challenges that need to be coped with, which makes IoT application development a great challenge. Hence, to realize this and other IoT applications, many different challenges need to be fulfilled, including security, privacy, timely data processing, communication standards, or location-awareness. In this survey article, the authors aim at describing these challenges based on an intensive literature review. By doing so, the authors further investigate which challenges are already fulfilled and which challenges still need to be worked on in more depth in the future, i.e., they discover existing research gaps. This paper is structured as follows: section 2 contains related work. Section 3 describes functional and non-functional requirements for IoT systems. Section 4 evaluates the challenges and section 5 shows future directions. Finally, section 6 summarizes this paper and gives an outlook on future work.

Related Work

This section describes related work to this article.

Kyriazis and Varvarigou (Kyriazis and Varvarigou, 2013) describe challenges and enablers of smart, autonomous and reliable IoT environments. Furthermore, they propose an architecture for cross-platform IoT applications.

Gubbi et al. (Gubbi et al., 2013) define a vision of the IoT as a cloud-centric system to collect and analyze data from multiple sensors. In contrast, the authors of this article consider the IoT as a highly distributed, decentralized, and autonomous system, where users and applications are the focus instead of data analysis.

The vision of the IoT stated by Miorandi et al. (Miorandi et al., 2012) is similar to the one introduced in this article. They see the IoT as a dynamic and distributed system of smart objects, which do not only collect data but also inter-act with the physical world. The vision described in this work is based on the one of Miorandi et al. Additionally to them, the authors of this article evaluate their vision from a current state-of-the-art view. Furthermore, they define a set of challenges that are, in their opinion, necessary to reach this vision.