Today, the Internet of Things (IoT) is comprised of vertically oriented platforms for things. Developers who want to use them need to negotiate access individually and need to adapt to the platform-specific API and information models. Having to do these efforts for each platform often outweighs the possible gains for application developers to adapt their applications to multiple platforms. This fragmentation of the IoT and the missing interoperability result in high entry barriers for developers and currently prevent the emergence of broadly accepted IoT ecosystems. This article presents the work of the BIG IoT project that aims at igniting an IoT ecosystem as part of the European Platform Initiative (IoT EPI). We introduce an architectural model for IoT ecosystems, and highlight five common interoperability patterns that need to be supported for enabling cross-platform interoperability and establishing successful IoT ecosystems.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is maturing and more and more IoT platforms that give access to things are emerging. However, the real potential of the IoT lies in growing IoT cross-domain ecosystems on top of these platforms that will deliver new, unanticipated value added applications and services. We identified two crucial aspects that are important to grow an IoT ecosystem: (i) interoperability to enable cross-platform and even cross-domain application developments on top of IoT platforms as well as (ii) marketplaces to share and monetize IoT resources. Having these two crucial pillars of an IoT ecosystem in mind, we present in this article the BIG IoT architecture as the foundation to establish IoT ecosystems. The architecture fulfills essential requirements that have been assessed among industry and research organizations as part of the BIG IoT project. We demonstrate a first proof-of-concept implementation in the context of an exemplary smart cities scenario.
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