The internet of things (IoT) is a global ecosystem of networked “things.” It is the subject of much research worldwide, although it still has many challenges to overcome before it can achieve its full potential. Many papers have been written on the IoT and related areas including big data analytics, smart cities, and industrial IoT (IIoT). These challenges have mostly been seen as technical, although the IoT's business and societal challenges are also important. Most authors of research papers discuss the research challenges with which they are most familiar, but a framework which identifies and classifies all the challenges and cross-references the publications describing them in detail, is much needed. In this chapter, the authors extend their earlier IoT classification scheme to include more recent papers, and business and societal challenges as well as technical ones. The nature of the classification scheme and research challenges are described; however, the other chapters of this book cover in more detail the individual challenges and proposed strategies to mitigate them.
TopIntroduction
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a global ecosystem of “things” electronically connected by wired or wireless networks. One way of viewing the IoT is:
IoT = Human + Physical Objects (sensors, controllers, actuators, devices, computing storages) + Internet (Farhan et al., 2018) as shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1. The Internet of Things showing that every ‘thing’ can be connected to the internet
However a consensus on a definition of IoT has not yet been reached, as enabling technologies keep evolving and new application domains are proposed (Ibarra-Esquer et al., 2017). Further, there are already emerging IoT subtypes such as Internet of Manufacturing Things, Internet of Medical Things, Internet of Military Things (IoMT), Ocean of Things, and Social Internet of Things that relate to specific application areas. Other authors include the Commercial Internet of Things (CIoT), the Consumer Internet of Things, and the Infrastructure Internet of Things (Anon, 2021). Many types of devices make up the IoT, including sensors, microcontrollers, transceivers, actuators and gateway-like devices (Nagasai, 2017). These come from numerous manufacturers worldwide, often using proprietary technologies, so that ensuring IoT devices can interoperate is one of the major challenges to be met.
The IoT is often touted as a solution to the many problems besetting the world in the 21st century. These problems, including climate change, pandemics, environmental degradation, urbanization and military conflict, threaten the future of humanity on earth and are seen to be in urgent need of solution. Many IoT-based artifacts and systems have been produced to mitigate some of these problems, but much more remains to be done and many challenges remain in order for the IoT to reach its full potential. These challenges can be classified broadly as technical, business and societal, but these categories are linked together in complex ways as in Figure 2.
Figure 2. Categories of IoT challenges
Plenty of research papers and books have been written on the IoT and related areas including big data analytics, smart cities and industrial IoT (IIoT). There are also many review papers which summarise and evaluate progress in IoT research and development reported in research papers, conferences and industry forums, so many in fact that several “reviews of the reviews” have been published (Aman et al., 2020; Swamy & Kota, 2020). As well, a growing number of review papers have been published on the topic of IoT challenges. Some of these restrict themselves to one particular set of challenges, such as privacy and security (Tawalbeh et al., 2020). Others set out to describe a number of challenges, although these papers have tended to confine themselves to technical challenges, or business challenges, or social challenges. Many authors concentrate on the particular challenges with which they are most familiar, which is understandable in such a complex field as the IoT. It must be noted however that a particular challenge, such as system-level design, is really a set of lower-level challenges, in this case including architecture, interoperability and scalability.
Interestingly, the papers cited here come from all parts of the world and not just the major research centres such as the US, Europe, and Northern Asia. Papers from the Middle East, South East Asia, Australia, and South America are also included. All countries including developing nations have investment in this new evolution of the internet that can stimulate their economic growth in areas including agriculture, transportation, utility management, and health (Alazie & Ebabye, 2019; Miazi et al., 2016).