During the last several years, prominent speakers and media headliners have promised us a big future for the Internet of Things (IoT). While some predict that growth of internet-connected things will reach $50 billion by 2020, or estimate the total annual economic impact of the IoT at up to $11 trillion by 2025, others believe that by 2020 almost a quarter billion vehicles will be connected to the internet, thus forming key elements for the IoT era.
While all these predictions could become reality, there is plenty of work still to be done, and many prerequisites must be completed to enable this revolutionary growth. Even now, a typical software architect with a common computer software design background could be easily confused by the plethora of terms, concepts, proprietary standards, protocols, and solutions for internet-connected things. Some of these have a more than 40-year history with roots in pre-internet implementations. Needless to say, a modern software engineer who lives in the age of open-source software, Git, powerful integrated development environments, and software-defined everything can be simply overwhelmed.
In this session, we will share our vision on the current state of the standardization process for the IoT and discuss several reference architectures with mapping to modern IoT protocols, platforms, middleware, and cloud-based offerings. We will also present real-world case studies that cover in more detail some architecture concerns such as maintainability, security, power efficiency, availability, and autonomy.