The Internet of things (IoT) has been emerging with a gradual tangible impact on everyday life. With such growth, its use cases are becoming more apparent, and routinely there is great demand for application systems at different domains of life and business. The existence of heterogeneous devices is a complicated issue concerned with their interaction and integration in an environment. The paper proposes a layered architecture to facilitate these interactions in a transparent computing architecture, and provides details and a performance evaluation via prototyping.

To handle the heterogeneity of the IoT computing environment, normally internal proxies are embedded in the devices for protocol translation and platform communication. The authors propose a centralized approach to communication among the devices, along with a distributed method to implement the scalability and performant utilization of device computing power. After a brief literature review, the authors introduce the key topic, transparent computing, as the foundation of the layered IoT architecture. A detailed implementation of the transparent computing-based architecture is expressed. Whereas abstraction between the software and hardware is the main dilemma, the complete implementation mechanism of the separation between software and hardware is not obvious. The key technologies of the architecture are discussed next, and operation evaluation results are provided.

The paper features a good IoT architecture and clearly dissects the anatomy of IoT.