IOT DEFINITION

 The Internet of things refers to a type of network to connect anything with the Internet based on
stipulated protocols through information sensing equipments to conduct information exchange
and communications in order to achieve smart recognitions, positioning, tracing, monitoring, and
administration.
 The Internet of Things, commonly abbreviated as IoT, refers to the connection of devices (other
than typical fare such as computers and smartphones) to the Internet. Cars, kitchen appliances,
and even heart monitors can all be connected through the IoT.
 The Internet of Things(IoT) can be defined as a network of physical objects or people called
"things" that are embedded with software, electronics, network, and sensors which allows these
objects to collect and exchange data.
CHARACTERISTICS
The fundamental characteristics of the IoT are
Interconnectivity: With regard to the IoT, anything can be interconnected with the global information
and communication infrastructure.
Things-related services: The IoT is capable of providing thing-related services within the constraints of
things, such as privacy protection and semantic consistency between physical things and their associated
virtual things. In order to provide thing-related services within the constraints of things, both the
technologies in physical world and information world will change.
Heterogeneity: The devices in the IoT are heterogeneous as based on different hardware platforms and
networks. They can interact with other devices or service platforms through different networks.
Dynamic changes: The state of devices change dynamically, e.g., sleeping and waking up, connected
and/or disconnected as well as the context of devices including location and speed. Moreover, the number
of devices can change dynamically.
Enormous scale: The number of devices that need to be managed and that communicate with each other
will be at least an order of magnitude larger than the devices connected to the current Internet. Even more
critical will be the management of the data generated and their interpretation for application purposes.
This relates to semantics of data, as well as efficient data handling.
Safety: As we gain benefits from the IoT, we must not forget about safety. As both the creators and
recipients of the IoT, we must design for safety. This includes the safety of our personal data and the
safety of our physical well-being. Securing the endpoints, the networks, and the data moving across all of
it means creating a security paradigm that will scale.
Connectivity: Connectivity enables network accessibility and compatibility.
Accessibility is getting on a network while compatibility provides the common ability to consume and
produce data.
IOT into three categories:

Internet of things is an internet of three things:

(1). People to people,
(2) People to machine /things,
(3) Things /machine to things /machine, Interacting through internet.

IOT FUNCTIONAL REQUIREMENTS

Functional requirements define the products and features that the IoT system must deliver. There are
seven categories of requirements to consider when developing any IoT initiative for private or public
institutions.
1. Feature requirements: What are the high-level expectations of the solution? This is the general
goal of the initiative.
2. Business requirements: This is a description of the new or improved capabilities the user must
be able to do as a result of the new system.
3. Nonfunctional requirements: This defines the service level expectations of the system such as
availability, reliability, scalability, security, backup, and disaster recovery.
4. Functional requirements: This is a description of the functions that the user requires from the
system. It should contain a process model, data entities, user stories, and use cases.
5. System design requirements: This defines the interaction of the IoT system with other systems.
6. IoT data management requirements: This describes how the data will be ingested and
analyzed. The following four areas need to be defined:  
 Ingestion: how the data will be collected and integrated into one data source
 Analytics: defines the predictive analytics models and data analysis requirements
 Communications: who needs to be informed when an alarm is identified
 Persistence: defines how long the data needs to be retained
7. Reports and dashboards: This defines the reports and dashboards that users need to rapidly
analyze and respond to data collected.

Smart City example

Let’s put these in the context of smart cities. We can use IoT applications to monitor parking on streets
and in public parking lots.
1. Feature requirements: To enable smart parking capability
2. Business requirements: Enables parking enforcement officers to quickly identify parking
offences
3. Nonfunctional requirements: Service is available 7 days a week, 24 hours a day
4. Functional requirements: Allows for remote monitoring and advanced analytics to assist in
predictive maintenance (see user story description below)
5. System design requirements: IoT system must work with the existing enterprise resource
planning (ERP) system
6. IoT data management requirements:
 Ingestion: capture video feeds from intersections, capture license plates of vehicles
 Analytics: identify drivers and number of vehicles parking illegally or driving recklessly
 Communication: communicates offence to the police
 Persistence: data must be retained for 10 years
7. Reports and dashboards: Dashboard presents the number of vehicles parked on the street or in
lots and tracks high traffic time periods. 

IOT − Advantages
 Improved Customer Engagement – Current analytics suffer from blind-spots and significant flaws in
accuracy; and as noted, engagement remains passive. IoT completely transforms this to achieve richer and
more effective engagement with audiences.
 Technology Optimization – The same technologies and data which improve the customer experience
also improve device use, and aid in more potent improvements to technology. IoT unlocks a world of
critical functional and field data.
 Reduced Waste – IoT makes areas of improvement clear. Current analytics give us superficial insight,
but IoT provides real-world information leading to more effective management of resources.
 Enhanced Data Collection – Modern data collection suffers from its limitations and its design for
passive use. IoT breaks it out of those spaces, and places it exactly where humans really want to go to
analyze our world. It allows an accurate picture of everything.

IoT − Disadvantages
 Security – IoT creates an ecosystem of constantly connected devices communicating over networks.
The system offers little control despite any security measures. This leaves users exposed to various kinds
of attackers.
 Privacy – The sophistication of IoT provides substantial personal data in extreme detail without the
user's active participation.
 Complexity – Some find IoT systems complicated in terms of design, deployment, and maintenance
given their use of multiple technologies and a large set of new enabling technologies.
 Flexibility – Many are concerned about the flexibility of an IoT system to integrate easily with
another. They worry about finding themselves with several conflicting or locked systems.
 Compliance – IoT, like any other technology in the realm of business, must comply with regulations.
Its complexity makes the issue of compliance seem incredibly challenging when many consider standard
software compliance a battle.

BUILDING BLOCKS OF IOT

Following are the four building blocks of IoT system and they have their own characteristics.

 Sensors
Sensors are the front end of the IoT devices. They really mean “things” in IoT. Their main task is to get
necessary data from surroundings and pass it further to database or processing systems. They must be
uniquely findable from there IP address because they are basic front end interface in the large network of
other devices. Sensors collect real time data and can either work autonomous or can be user controlled.
Examples of sensors are: gas sensor, water quality sensor, moisture sensor, etc.
 Processors
As computer and other electrical systems, processors are the brain of the IoT system. The main job of
processors it to process raw data collected by the sensors and transforms them to some meaningful
information and knowledge. In short, we can say that its job is to give intelligence to the data.
Processors are easily controllable by applications and their one more important job is to securing data.
They perform encryption and decryption of data.
Microcontroller, embedded hardware devices, etc can process the data using processors attached within
the devices.
 Gateways
Main task of gateways is to route the processed data and transfer it to proper databases or network storage
for proper utilization. In other words, gateway helps in communication of the data. Communication and
network connectivity are essentials for IoT systems.
Examples of gateways are LAN, WAN, PAN, etc.

ARCHITECTURE OF IOT
There is no single consensus on architecture for IoT, which is agreed universally. Different architectures
have been proposed by different researchers.

2.1. Three- and Five-Layer Architectures

The most basic architecture is a three-layer architecture [3–5] as shown in Figure 1. It was introduced in
the early stages of research in this area. It has three layers, namely, the perception, network, and
application layers.(i)The perception layer is the physical layer, which has sensors for sensing and
gathering information about the environment. It senses some physical parameters or identifies other smart
objects in the environment.(ii)The network layer is responsible for connecting to other smart things,
network devices, and servers. Its features are also used for transmitting and processing sensor data.
(iii)The application layer is responsible for delivering application specific services to the user. It defines
various applications in which the Internet of Things can be deployed, for example, smart homes, smart
cities, and smart health.

Figure 1 
Architecture of IoT (A: three layers) (B: five layers).

The three-layer architecture defines the main idea of the Internet of Things, but it is not sufficient for
research on IoT because research often focuses on finer aspects of the Internet of Things. That is why, we
have many more layered architectures proposed in the literature. One is the five-layer architecture, which
additionally includes the processing and business layers [3–6]. The five layers are perception, transport,
processing, application, and business layers (see Figure 1). The role of the perception and application
layers is the same as the architecture with three layers. We outline the function of the remaining three
layers.(i)The transport layer transfers the sensor data from the perception layer to the processing layer and
vice versa through networks such as wireless, 3G, LAN, Bluetooth, RFID, and NFC.(ii)The  processing
layer is also known as the middleware layer. It stores, analyzes, and processes huge amounts of data that
comes from the transport layer. It can manage and provide a diverse set of services to the lower layers. It
employs many technologies such as databases, cloud computing, and big data processing modules.
(iii)The business layer manages the whole IoT system, including applications, business and profit models,
and users’ privacy. The business layer is out of the scope of this paper. Hence, we do not discuss it
further.
Another architecture proposed by Ning and Wang [7] is inspired by the layers of processing in the human
brain. It is inspired by the intelligence and ability of human beings to think, feel, remember, make
decisions, and react to the physical environment. It is constituted of three parts. First is the human brain,
which is analogous to the processing and data management unit or the data center. Second is the spinal
cord, which is analogous to the distributed network of data processing nodes and smart gateways. Third is
the network of nerves, which corresponds to the networking components and sensors.

2.2. Cloud and Fog Based Architectures

Let us now discuss two kinds of systems architectures: cloud and fog computing (see the reference
architectures in [8]). Note that this classification is different from the classification in Section 2.1, which
was done on the basis of protocols. In particular, we have been slightly vague about the nature of data
generated by IoT devices, and the nature of data processing. In some system architectures the data
processing is done in a large centralized fashion by cloud computers. Such a cloud centric architecture
keeps the cloud at the center, applications above it, and the network of smart things below it [9]. Cloud
computing is given primacy because it provides great flexibility and scalability. It offers services such as
the core infrastructure, platform, software, and storage. Developers can provide their storage tools,
software tools, data mining, and machine learning tools, and visualization tools through the cloud. Lately,
there is a move towards another system architecture, namely, fog computing [10–12], where the sensors
and network gateways do a part of the data processing and analytics. A fog architecture [13] presents a
layered approach as shown in Figure 2, which inserts monitoring, preprocessing, storage, and security
layers between the physical and transport layers. The monitoring layer monitors power, resources,
responses, and services. The preprocessing layer performs filtering, processing, and analytics of sensor
data. The temporary storage layer provides storage functionalities such as data replication, distribution,
and storage. Finally, the security layer performs encryption/decryption and ensures data integrity and
privacy. Monitoring and preprocessing are done on the edge of the network before sending data to the
cloud.

Figure 2 
Fog architecture of a smart IoT gateway.

Often the terms “fog computing” and “edge computing” are used interchangeably. The latter term
predates the former and is construed to be more generic. Fog computing originally termed by Cisco refers
to smart gateways and smart sensors, whereas edge computing is slightly more penetrative in nature. This
paradigm envisions adding smart data preprocessing capabilities to physical devices such as motors,
pumps, or lights. The aim is to do as much of preprocessing of data as possible in these devices, which are
termed to be at the edge of the network. In terms of the system architecture, the architectural diagram is
not appreciably different from Figure 2. As a result, we do not describe edge computing separately.

Finally, the distinction between protocol architectures and system architectures is not very crisp. Often
the protocols and the system are co-designed. We shall use the generic 5-layer IoT protocol stack
(architectural diagram presented in Figure 2 for both the fog and cloud architectures.