Platforms and Protocols for the Internet of Things

Abstract

Building a general architecture for the Internet of Things (IoT) is a very complex task, exacerbated by theextremely large variety of devices, link layer technologies, and services that may be involved in such asystem. In this paper, we identify the main blocks of a generic IoT architecture, describing their featuresand requirements, and analyze the most common approaches proposed in the literature for each block. Inparticular, we compare three of the most important communication technologies for IoT purposes, i.e., REST,MQTT, and AMQP, and we also analyze three IoT platforms: openHAB, Sentilo, and Parse. The analysis willprove the importance of adopting an integrated approach that jointly addresses several issues and is able toflexibly accommodate the requirements of the various elements of the system. We also discuss a use case whichillustrates the design challenges and the choices to make when selecting which protocols and technologies touse.

Keywords

• Internet of Things
• IoT architecture
• IoT protocols
• REST
• MQTT
• AMQP
• IoT middleware