The Internet of Things (IoT): a survey of techniques, operating systems, and trends
| Published date | 05 October 2019 |
| Date | 05 October 2019 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/LHT-12-2018-0200 |
| Pages | 5-66 |
| Author | Elham Ali Shammar,Ammar Thabit Zahary |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Librarianship/library management,Library technology,Information behaviour & retrieval,Information user studies,Information & knowledge management,Information & communications technology,Internet |
The Internet of Things (IoT):
a survey of techniques, operating
systems, and trends
Elham Ali Shammar and Ammar Thabit Zahary
Department of Information Technology,
Faculty of Computer and Information Technology, Sana’a University, Sana’a, Yemen
Abstract
Purpose –Internet has changed radically in the way people interact in the virtual world, in their careers or
social relationships. IoT technology hasadded a new vision to this process by enabling connections between
smart objects and humans, and also between smart objects themselves, which leads to anything, anytime,
anywhere,and any media communications.IoT allows objects to physicallysee, hear, think, and perform tasks
by making themtalk to each other, share informationand coordinate decisions. To enablethe vision of IoT, it
utilizes technologies such as ubiquitous computing, context awareness, RFID, WSN, embedded devices, CPS,
communication technologies, and internet protocols. IoT is considered to be the future internet, which is
significantly different from the Internet we use today. The purpose of this paper is to provide up-to-date
literature on trends of IoT research which is driven by the need for convergence of several interdisciplinary
technologies and newapplications.
Design/methodology/approach –A comprehensive IoT literature review has been performed in this paper
as a survey. The survey starts by providing an overview of IoT concepts, visions and evolutions. IoT
architectures are also explored. Then, the most important components of IoT are discussed including a
thorough discussion of IoT operating systems such as Tiny OS, Contiki OS, FreeRTOS, and RIOT. A review
of IoT applications is also presented in this paper and finally, IoT challenges that can be recently encountered
by researchers are introduced.
Findings –Studies of IoT literature and projects show the disproportionate importance of technology in IoT
projects, which are often driven by technological interventions rather than innovation in the business model.
Thereare a number of seriousconcerns aboutthe dangers of IoT growth,particularlyin the areas of privacyand
security; hence, industry and government began addressing these concerns. At the end, what makes IoT exciting
is that we do not yet know the exact use cases which would have the ability to significantly influence our lives.
Originality/value –This survey provides a comprehensive literature review on IoT techniques, operating
systems and trends.
Keywords Internet of Things, IoT, Middleware, Ubiquitous Computing, Context Aware Systems,
embedded devices
Paper type Literature review
1. Introduction
Today, the internet is dominated by Web 2.0, but the researchers have been working on
another aim of makingthe internet behave more intelligently,which is referred to as Web 3.0
or Semantic Web. In the Semantic Web, the web content becomes more understandable by
machines and itcan be processed and shared by the machinesthemselves. The machines and
search enginesbehave more intelligently without the needfor human intervention (Whitmore
et al., 2015). Manythings in our daily lives have become wirelessly connected with miniatures
and low-powered wireless devices such as radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags,
near-field communication (NFC), Electronic Product Code (EPC), mobile devices and GPS,
along with the development of many technologies such as sensors, actuators, embedded
computing,machine-to-machine (M2M) communication and cloud computing. It was expected
that there will be 7 trillion wireless devices to serve 7bn people (1,000 devices/person). This
ultra-huge numberof connected devices or things and the new techniques have introduced a
paradigm, commonly referred to as theInternet of Things (IoT) (Razzaqueet al., 2016). In IoT,
every vital object in our daily life such as the wallet, watch, refrigerator, car, etc., will be
Received 18 December 2018
Revised 24 March 2019
3 June 2019
Accepted 8 August 2019
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/0737-8831.htm
The Internet of
Things (IoT)
LibraryHi Tech
Vol.38 No. 1, 2020
pp.5-66
©EmeraldPublishingLimited
0737-8831
DOI10.1108/LHT-12-2018-0200
5
connected with each other and with the internet. Anyone would be able to track his/her
belongings fromanywhere, anytime and any network.Those objects would send alertsto the
users, in any event,to keep them safe. Hence, this revolutionwill change the way people think,
live and work (Singh et al., 2014).
IoT startedin 1998, and the term IoT was originallycoined by Kevin Ashton in 1999. IoT is
an expansion of Mark Weiser’s vision of ubiquitous computing (UbiComp), which aims to
produce a global network that supports UbiComp and context awareness among devices.
Establishing IoT is based on the proliferation of wireless sensor network (WSN), mobile
computing (MobiComp), UbiComp and information technologies. Ambient intelligence is one
of the key components of IoT. UbiComp and context awareness are the mainrequirements of
ambient intelligence, in which everyday devices would be able to understand their
environment, interact with each other and with humans and make the decisions. IoT
application scenarios require applications to demonstrate their adaptability to very diverse
contexts with different available resources and possibly changing deployment environments
over time. Since the origin of IoT, it has been evolving in a tremendous way and it is still an
emerging trend for researchers in both academia and industry( Miorandi et al., 2012; Porkodi
and Bhuvaneswari, 2014; Whitmore et al., 2015; Zhang et al., 2011).
The NationalIntelligence Council andMcKinsey Global Instituteannounced that everyday
things like food packages, furniture, paper documents, etc., will represent internet nodes by
2025. They highlighted the future that would be created by combining the technologies that
interact withthe human environment. Theinformation technology andembedded technology
would havea potential impact on the revolution of using smartobjects, which play a mainrole
in the IoT vision (Asghar et al., 2015; Atzori et al., 2010). It is impractical, in a UbiComp
environment like IoT, to make standards and enforce everyone to adhere to them. Having a
very wide networkof things and a large number of eventsthat can be automaticallygenerated
by those things, coupled with heterogeneous devices/technologies/applications in the IoT,
brings new challenges in the application development and makes the existing challenges in
UbiComp much more tricky (Razzaque et al., 2016).
The heterogeneous nature and the increasing popularity of IoT and the rapid growth of
IoT articles posechallenges to provide an appropriate synthesizingof previous IoT literature.
IoT’s research studies mostly come with different points of concentration, which hinder the
understanding and the accumulation of knowledge in the existing literature. Moreover, the
exponential growth of IoT research aggravatesthe problem, leading to an invincible obstacle
in conducting a systematic review of IoT literature. Liu et al. (2017) conducted a systematic
literature review on prior IoT research through a combination of both quantitative and
qualitative approaches. The researchers aimed to address the aforementioned challenges by
reviewing 1,065 articles on IoT obtained from the International Statistical Institute Web of
Science througha combination of quantitativecitation analysis using HistCite and qualitative
content analysis by qualifying the knowledge progression chronologically.
This survey will provide up-to-date literature on IoT research trends driven by the need
for the convergence of several interdisciplinary technologies and new applications. This
survey can contribute to the future development and research on IoT. This paper is
organized as follows: Section 2 will explore the IoT concepts and visions. IoT evolution will
be presented in Section 3. Section 4 will explore the IoT architecture. IoT components will be
discussed thoroughly in Section 5, including the review of the most recent IoT operating
systems (OSs). IoT enabling technologies and trends will be provided in Section 6. Section 7
and Section 8 will take a glance in IoT standardizations and IoT protocols. IoT
cybersecurity and quality of service (QoS) will be introduced in Sections 9 and 10,
respectively. Several application domains in IoT will be reviewed in Section 11. Section 12
will provide the challenges that face the IoT vision and open research issues. Finally, the
paper will be concluded in Section 13.
LHT
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2. IoT concept and visions
In 1999, the concept of IoT was first proposed by Kevin Ashton as interconnected objects
that can be uniquely identified with RFID technology. Nevertheless, the exact definition of
IoT is still in the formation phase which depends on the researchers’points of view
(Bandyopadhyay and Sen, 2011; Li et al., 2015; Perera et al., 2014). Even if the traditional
concept of the internet will vanish, the internet infrastructure itself will not disappear. The
internet will keep its vital role as a global backbone for sharing and disseminating
information around the world. The concept of smart interconnected objects, which
constitute widespread computing environments, will be enabled by integrating electronics
into everyday physical objects and allowing those objects to seamlessly, smoothly and
intelligently integrate into the resulting global physical infrastructure. In IoT, the
connection will not be merely between end-user devices, but also between the physical
objects that communicate with each other and/or humans in order to provide a particular
service. The traditional methods of networking, computing and administration would also
be changed (Miorandi et al., 2012). The outstanding goal of IoT is to create a better world for
the human beings, where things around us know what we love, want and need, thus taking
the proper action accordingly without explicit instructions from us (Perera et al., 2014). To
summarize, the IoT is the next generation of the internet, by which any physical objects can
be connected, accessed and identified over the internet (Li et al., 2015). Figure 1 shows the
different aspects of the IoT concept.
Large differences in IoT insights emerge from the fact that IoT includes miscellaneous
stakeholders, businesses, research studies and standardizations. Everybody is trying to
interpret and define the IoT according to his/her specific needs, concerns and backgrounds
(Atzori et al., 2010; Singh et al., 2014). The two words “internet”and “things”, when they
come together, carry the meaning that offers a fascinating level of innovation in the world of
information and communication technology (ICT). The first one moves the focus toward an
“Internet-oriented vision”of IoT, whereas the second one moves the attention to the second
vision, “Things-oriented vision.”Both are integrated to form a common framework in which
a huge number of heterogeneous things/objects are connected to each other (Atzori et al.,
2010; Bandyopadhyay and Sen, 2011). These visions involve a massive amount of data that
would be generated and collected from vast numbers of sensors. Therefore, we will have an
enormous amount of information, maybe redundant, that must be addressed meaningfully.
This concept moves the attention to the third vision, “Semantic-oriented vision.”With this
vision, the huge generated data would be managed and processed to get better
representations and understanding and to help in making the proper decision. Figure 2
shows the IoT vision from the aforementioned perspectives: internet-oriented,
things-oriented (smart things and sensors) and semantic-oriented ( knowledge)
Anyone
Anybody
Any service
Any business
Any path
Any network
Anywhere
Any place
Anytime
Any context
Anything
Any device
IoTs
Sources: Perera et al. (2014), Razzaque et al. (2016)
Figure 1.
IoT concept aspects
The Internet of
Things (IoT)
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