Nowadays, with the miniaturization of devices with ample computing and storage capabilities, and the proliferation of energy-efficient wireless hardware facilitating the interconnection of such devices, the concept of the Internet of Things (IoT) is getting one step closer to realization. The term IoT, originally proposed by Kevin Ashton in 1999, denotes the transparent connection of resources, systems, and services across domains and applications, using a variety of communication interfaces and protocols. The IoT ecosystem was envisaged for enhancing the quality of people’s lives through intelligent application solutions and platforms by capitalizing on the seamless interoperability and information sharing abilities of connected devices. Inherently, the IoT will cover a wide spectrum of technological and application fields, often with very little in common, so there is a need for a common ground at an abstract layer.

To this end, this book provides a summary of the European Union (EU)-funded project IoT-A (http://www.iot-a.eu) and specifically the work that contributed to the development of the architectural reference model (ARM) for the IoT. It collects and presents the contributions of over 50 scientists from various institutions around Europe, all of whom perform state-of-the-art research in the area of IoT. As discussed in the introduction, the book comprises two parts.

The first part, chapters 2 to 4, provides introductory material for the general audience interested in IoT. Here, the reader is given a high-level overview of IoT concept and presented with a number of visionary application scenarios in transportation/logistics, smart home/cities, and e-health, where IoT can be collectively applied. Given that communication is key in IoT, the hierarchy of networks that will ultimately support the realization and maintenance of the ecosystem are discussed. The IoT ARM is presented as a lingua franca for designing architecture or using/analyzing systems in the IoT domain. IoT ARM reference models comprising a minimal set of concepts and axioms for understanding relationships between various entities are sufficient to enable the development of specific architectures, which are use case and requirement (such as performance, functionality, and security) sensitive. Interestingly, the first part includes a number of use case scenarios that constantly recur throughout the book in order to exemplify the implementation of key concepts of the ARM, enabling easy comprehension from the reader perspective.

The second part, chapters 5 to 12, addresses individual IoT ARM topics on a more scientific level and requires some prior technical knowledge from the reader. It is important to note that the book does not provide solutions for a set of particular domain models. Rather, they present all the concepts and give detailed guidance, clarification, and best practices on how each one can be applied by engineers to develop a dedicated IoT architecture. The second section begins by providing guidance material to prospective IoT system architects, wherein the usage of the ARM toward deriving domain-specific architectures is explained in depth. Consequently, various processes for generating concrete IoT architectures are broken down into what are known as architectural views and discussed extensively step by step. Moreover, the capability of the IoT ARM to address design choices (such as performance, scalability, trust, security, privacy, availability, and resilience) in an implementation and functionality agnostic manner is presented. The IoT reference model and reference architecture are established, and guidelines are provided on how to use the various models, perspectives, and interactions in creating a concrete IoT architecture for a particular area of interest. Utilizing one of the recurring use case scenarios, the reader is shown how to apply the concepts presented earlier in the book. Furthermore, various exercises exemplify how existing business standards and platforms can be reverse mapped to the IoT ARM.

Overall, this book flows very well and touches on a number of important aspects concerning the design of IoT domain-specific architectures. Importantly, to assist the reader, all chapters include supporting references to known literature works from the software analysis and engineering field. If your goal is to learn or employ IoT technologies, this book serves as a worthy starting point for that journey; you will certainly benefit from having it in your library for future reference.