Middleware for Internet of Things: A Survey

Abstract

The Internet-of-Things (IoT) envisages a future in which digital and physical things or objects (e.g., smartphones, TVs, cars) can be connected by means of suitable information and communication technologies, to enable a range of applications and services. The IoT's characteristics, including an ultra largescale network of things, device and network level heterogeneity, and the large number of events generated spontaneously by these things, will make development of the diverse applications and services a very challenging task. In general, middleware can ease the development process by integrating heterogeneous computing and communications devices, and supporting interoperability within the diverse applications and services. Recently, there have been a number of proposals for IoT middleware. These proposals mostly addressed Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), a key component of IoT, but do not consider Radio-Frequency IDentification (RFID), Machine to Machine (M2M) communications, and Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA), other three core elements in the IoT vision. Taking a holistic view, in this article, we outline a set of requirements for IoT middleware, and present a comprehensive review of the existing middleware solutions against those requirements. In addition, open research issues, challenges and future research directions are highlighted.

A survey of secure middleware for the Internet of Things

“…This set was identified through a combination of the existing literature reviews on IoT middleware (Bandyopadhyay et al, 2011b;Chaqfeh & Mohamed, 2012;Razzaque et al, 2016) together with our own search for middleware systems that explicitly target IoT scenarios. Some of the systems that were included in these papers we excluded from our list on the basis that they were not middleware.…”

“…Atzori, Iera & Morabito (2010) is a very broad survey paper that addresses IoT middleware loosely. Razzaque et al (2016) is another wide-ranging survey of IoT middleware that provides a simple analysis of whether the surveyed systems have any support for security or privacy, but does not address detailed requirements.…”

CHARIOT: An IoT Middleware for the Integration of Heterogeneous Entities in a Smart Urban Factory

“…Finally, IoT platforms should also be designed in a scalable way, so that it is possible to add new devices and services without imposing a challenge on existing services while adapting itself to resource-constrained and resource-rich situations. For a detailed analysis of IoT platforms, the readers are encouraged to check [2].…”

“…It provides a manageable and intelligent RE, on which running applications can aggregate data and share them securely with a cloud platform. IoT REs have a requirement of being able to run on any IoT device, and Kura fulfills this requirement to some extent by being able to run on various platforms such as mobile devices, desktop, wearables and Raspberry PI [2]. Kura is a Java-based platform built on top of the Open Service Gateway Initiative (OSGi) framework; therefore, it is compatible with Windows and Linux and other operating systems for which Java is available.…”

Contribution to the design, implementation and standardization of semantic middleware architectures for the Smart Grid

“…Its usability and utility became greatly expanded during the late 1990s and early 2000s with the uprising of Internet usage, the first developments dealing with the Internet of Things (IoT) and mobile computing, as those are systems that are by definition distributed and heterogeneous [14] [15]. It was during that time that middleware for distributed systems was definitely established as the software entity capable of abstracting heterogeneity from an underlying collection of hardware devices in order to offer a set of homogenous, centralized-looking facilities (typically, an Application Programming Interface or API) to the application layer [16] [17]. Further developments, such as Cloud Computing, have made middleware a software entity of critical importance in the development of distributed systems [18] [19].…”