A Reference Architecture for federating IoT infrastructures supporting semantic interoperability

Abstract

The Internet-of-Things (IoT) is unanimously identified as one of the main pillars of future smart scenarios. However, despite the growing number of IoT deployments, the majority of IoT applications tend to be self-contained, thereby forming vertical silos. Indeed, the ability to combine and synthesize data streams and services from diverse IoT platforms and testbeds, holds the promise to increase the potential of smart applications in terms of size, scope and targeted business context. This paper describes the system architecture for the FIESTA-IoT platform, whose main aim is to federate a large number of testbeds across the planet, in order to offer experimenters the unique experience of dealing with a large number of semantically interoperable data sources. This system architecture was developed by following the Architectural Reference Model (ARM) methodology promoted by the IoT-A project (FP7 'light house' project on Architecture for the Internet of Things). Through this process, the FIESTA-IoT architecture is composed of a set of Views that deals with a 'logical' functional decomposition (Functional View, FV) and data structuring and annotation, data flows and inter-functional component interactions (Information View, IV).