IoT-A Architecture Reference Model. The main aim of the IoT-A project was to propose an IoT Architecture Reference Model (ARM). The intended usage of the ARM is the following: • To serve as a cognitive aid – guiding discussions since it provides a common language to everyone involved and helping in identifying independent building blocks of an IoT system; • Common grounding – definition of IoT entities and describing their basic interactions and relationships with each other, i.e. the ARM provides common concepts that should be used to build compliant IoT systems; • Generation of architecture – IoT ARM can be used for the generation of compliant architectures for specific systems using provided best practices, and facilitating creation of interoperable IoT systems; • Benchmarking – standardized description, ordering and delineation of components provide a high level of transparency and inherent comparability to the benchmarking process. The relationship between reference architecture, architectures and the actual systems is outlined in Figure 1. Reference Models and Reference Architectures provide a description of greater abstraction than what is inherent to actual systems and applications. They are more abstract than system architectures that have been designed for a particular application with particular constraints and choices. Guidance in the form of best practices can be associated to reference architecture in order to derive use-case-specific architectures.
Figure 1: Relationship between a Reference Architecture, architectures and actual systems (taken from IoT-A [2]) Figure 3 shows a functional view of an IoT-A ARM containing seven longitudinal functionality groups complemented by two transversal functionality groups (Management and Security). These transversal groups provide functionalities that are required by each of the longitudinal groups. For IoT6, of particular interest are the following functionality groups: IoT Business Process Management, Communication, Device and Security. The IoT Business Process Management Functionality Group (BPM FG) relates to the integration of traditional business process management systems. The overall aim of this FG is to provide the functional concepts and interfaces necessary to augment traditional business processes with the idiosyncrasies of the IoT world, so that enterprises can effectively utilize IoT subsystems adhering to common standards and best practices, thus avoiding the overhead and costs of isolated and proprietary “intranet-of-thin...
IoT-A Architecture Reference Model.
Figure 1: Relationship between a reference architecture, architectures and actual systems (taken from IoT-A [2])
