A Holistic Overview of the Internet of Things Ecosystem

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a complex ecosystem of connected devices that exchange data over a wired or wireless network and whose final aim is to provide services either to humans or machines. The IoT has seen rapid development over the past decade. The total number of installed connected devices is expected to grow exponentially in the near future, since more and more domains are looking for IoT solutions. As a consequence, an increasing number of developers are approaching IoT technology for the first time. Unfortunately, the number of IoT-related studies published every year is becoming huge, with the obvious consequence that it would be impossible for anyone to predict the time that could be necessary to find a paper talking about a given problem at hand. This is the reason why IoT-related discussions have become predominant in various practitioners’ forums, which moderate thousands of posts each month. The present paper’s contribution is twofold. First, it aims at providing a holistic overview of the heterogeneous IoT world by taking into account a technology perspective and a business perspective. For each topic taken into account, a tutorial introduction (deliberately devoid of technical content to make this document within the reach of non-technical readers as well) is provided. Then, a table of very recent review papers is given for each topic, as the result of a systematic mapping study.

Papers Mentioning Things Board: A Systematic Mapping Study

“…So far, the Cloud is the prevalent deployment solution adopted for IoT applications, because it offers computing resources on-demand and boundless storage. However, it has been pointed out that connecting IoT devices to the Cloud poses severe issues (Paolone et al, 2022). To fill the gap between IoT devices and the Cloud, the Fog-Edge computing paradigms have been introduced (Ali et al, 2022) The reading of the 55 studies confirmed that ThingsBoard can be used both in Cloud architecture and in Fog/Edge architecture.…”

A Systematic Mapping Study about IoT Platforms

“…Additionally, ref. [4] defines IoT platforms in terms of functions and services, i.e., in terms of the characteristics of the IoT infrastructure and the IoT application to be developed; in [5], platforms are classified according to two complementary dimensions: Functional Blocks and Qualities. Finally, ref.…”

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“…Digital twins are the most complex models that describe the structure, context and behavior of both individual industrial assets and the systems that comprise them (Priyanka E., et al, 2021;Wang P., Luo M., 2021;Fonseca A., et al, 2022;Lehtola V. et al, 2022;Paolone G., et al, 2022;Thürera M., et al, 2022;Valka H. et al, 2022;Zhang R. et al, 2022;Xiang F. et al, 2022). For example, Zambrano V. et al, 2022 in their work "Industrial digitalization in the industry 4.0 era: Classification, reuse and authoring of digital models on Digital Twin platforms" describe the support of the modular design of digital twins through the reuse of their basic building blocks, i.e., the models describing the behavior of the DT, the algorithms associated with them, and the data required for their evaluation.…”