The Anatomy of IoT Platforms—A Systematic Multivocal Mapping Study

Abstract

Due to the large variety of Internet of Things (IoT) platforms, selecting the right one to implement an IoT solution is a tough task. To mitigate right selection by the developer, this paper presents a Systematic Multivocal Mapping Study on IoT platforms and its main software elements, to define their anatomy considering how they were studied by the market analysts and academia. By using a precise protocol defined on this work, it was possible to select 50 academic articles and industry reports that perform IoT platform descriptions, evaluations and comparisons. As results, this paper identified the most important IoT platforms are AWS IoT, Azure IoT, Watson IoT, PTC ThingWorx and Google IoT. Its main capabilities are Interoperability, Security & Privacy, Developer Support, Data Management, Device Management and Services Management. It was also defined an architectural model with the main platform components highlighted according to their relevance, the main communication models (Publish/Subscribe and REST APIs) and the common API that should be implemented by the IoT platforms.

Keywords

• Internet of Things
• IoT middleware
• IoT platform
• multivocal literature review
• software architecture
• systematic mapping study