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The Internet of Things: a survey
Li S., Xu L., Zhao S. Information Systems Frontiers17 (2):243-259,2015.Type:Article
Date Reviewed: Oct 11 2016

Undisputedly, the Internet of Things (IoT), extending the classic computer-bound Internet to the physical world and all the “things” contained therein, will be a really big thing. Equally unanimously, connecting and communicating with potentially billions of devices (literally) scattered all over the globe will present some real engineering challenges.

Recognizing this, a survey of definitions, techniques, and open issues and challenges would be convenient. The current paper, however, only partially succeeds at this task.

The survey represents the state of the art at about the end of 2013 and, as strong points, includes a wealth of IoT definitions and pointers to IoT initiatives, several tables nicely summarizing various IoT standards, and also various pointers to applications of the IoT.

While the authors (correctly) advocate a service-oriented architecture (SOA) for tackling the formidable integration requirements, they fail in providing a clear description of their four-layer SOA. Too much (shallow) jargon (for example, “M2M” is not a standard per se, but simply means “machine-to-machine”) and only trivial examples bring them close to contradicting themselves (for example, when talking about their “service layer” as an “application layer”).

The English sometimes would have profited from more editorial support (“services run directly on the network,” “increase interoperability for loosely-coupled between services and […] applications”). Hence, I am not sure whether the authors do not know the difference between a “service” as an abstract concept, the invocation of a service, and the definition of a service or if it is just the imprecise language that creates this confusion.

Additionally, the authors take a quite narrow radio-frequency identification (RFID) and sensor-centric approach to the IoT (missing actuators, motors, and other gear); at places, they seem to require the (future) IoT to be a very big “single” global network of all devices communicating with all others and even exclude wireless (mash) networks or ad hoc networks from being part of IoT.

Reviewer:  Christoph F. Strnadl Review #: CR144832 (1701-0057)
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