IOT Technology, Applications, and Challenges: A Contemporary Survey and Classification

Introduction

The fact that technology in various fields will evolve through the years, is the reason why we observe a rapid change in the shape, size and capacity of various instruments, components and the products used in daily life. Currently available networks have made a world more connected nowadays, but still opportunities to enhance are endless. These networks can install or can connect devices with out or with minimum interference of humans. But, the current network standards and technologies landscape is highly fragmented from machine-to-machine communication (Elijah, 2018). This is because of different applied domains or of technologies being designed beyond basic communications and networking standards. Additionally, there is dire need for global standardization at inter-operatability level(Porkodi, 2014; Gubbi, 2013; Amendola, 2014).

• IoT is the future of our increasingly digitized world in umpteen number of domains. IoT is a choice for intelligent systems as nowadays more machines are being connected to the Internet than people, likewise many more connected products are entering our lives over the next few years as embedded micro-electronics promulgate in day to day via usable things(Xu. 2014). IoT is called the world’s fourth wave of information industry after computers and computer networks. IoT is the pivotal component of a new generation information technology.

Scope Of The Work

IoT can be everywhere and it can accommodate as well suit for various domain of application as well as integrates with different domains to sole real-time problems in an easier manner. The Internet of Things gives us an opportunity to construct effective administrations, applications for manufacturing, lifesaving solutions, proper cultivation and more. According to Forbes survey the top IoT segments in 2018 based on 1600 real IoT projects is presented in figure 1. The figure 2 depicts the IoT’s applicability in various applications in this decade.

Figure 1.

Number of articles published different areas of IoT during 2013-2018

Figure 2.

IOT Project investments under different domain in 2018

Related Work

In the past, many studies were conducted to review the IoT. Benefits and challenges of IoT in agriculture have been presented (Elijah, 2018). This survey does not detail on the types of protocols and implementation challenges faced in agricultural domain. In an effort to understand the progress of IoT in industries, key enabling technologies for IoT applications in industry were discussed in (Amendola, 2014). But M2M has not been addressed in the survey. (Lin, 2017) overviewed IoT with respect to system architecture, technologies, and security and privacy issues. However, the technologies for important applications like healthcare, agriculture has not been addressed in this survey. (Goudos, 2017) reviewed IoT technology starting from physical layer to application layer for smart city, transportation and healthcare applications. However security aspects present in these IoT protocols has not been addressed. In (Alam, 2018) healthcare technologies and healthcare solutions were discussed. But complete end to end healthcare application solution and IoT life save tools has not been explored. Authors (Gharaibeh, 2015) have highlighted the achievements in realizing various aspects of smart cities. Moreover this survey addresses smart health management in smart cities but smart structural health management which equally important in smart cities has not been addressed. From the source of Statista figure 3 compares projected growth in spending by vertical globally from 2015-2020 and accordingly smart cities (23%), connected industries (17%) and connected buildings (12%).

Figure 3.

IoT Project investments between 2015-20