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The expression “Internet of Things” (IoT), coined back in 1999 by Kevin Ashton, the British technology pioneer who cofounded the Auto-ID Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is becoming more and more mainstream. In opening the IoT Week 2013 with a pre-recorded video message, Ashton insisted on the realization that IoT is here ; it is not the but the . While Gartner identifies IoT as one of the top ten strategic technology trends, Cisco forecasts 50 billion devices connected by 2020, a potential market in excess of $14 trillion, and also claims that IoT is actually already here. Similarly, it is not only companies with a technological focus, such as Ericsson, Bosch or Siemens that use IoT to advertise their cutting edge technologies – media companies such as the BBC are conducting research activities and have plans for IoT deployment. In short, we are currently on the verge of witnessing the emergence of a “mega-market”, where markets such as home and building automation, electricity generation and distribution, logistics, automotive, as well as telecommunications and information technology will steadily converge. As yet, we do not know the consequences of connecting all of these smart objects (smart meter, e-vehicle, cargo container, fridge etc.) to the Internet.

The Internet of Things concept has evolved rapidly in recent years. It can be seen as an umbrella term for interconnected technologies, devices, objects and services. Nevertheless, after many years of heavy discussion, there is still no clear and common definition of the concept. And yet the application scenarios and market opportunities offered by objects communicating actively and autonomously extend far beyond the foreseeable horizon.

As identified in the previous chapter, IoT-A has created an “Architectural Reference Model” (IoT ARM) as the common ground for the Internet of Things. The core idea is that the IoT ARM provides a common structure and guidelines for dealing with core aspects of developing, using and analysing IoT systems. The first part of this chapter provides a non-exclusive list of the beneficial uses of the IoT ARM. In the second part we focus on the role of the IoT ARM in the architecture development process.

The previous chapters gave a first impression of the ARM as common ground for the Internet of Things. In the following sections we will introduce use cases and sample scenarios (scenes) that have been used as a practical evaluation of the ARM in specific applications. Using the ARM in a top-down process, starting from an application description, most of the scenes introduced were realized as demonstrators within a specific work-package of IoT-A. The second, bottom-up approach of reverse mapping an existing application to the ARM is shown with a scene brought in by the stakeholder group of IoT-A.

A major goal of this Guidance Chapter is to provide guidance for system architects. In other words, we aim at explaining the usage of the IoT ARM. One of the major focus areas of this guidance is the derivation of domain-specific architectures from the ARM. For other potential usages of the IoT ARM see . The structure of the technical part B of this book is depicted in Fig. 5.1.

This chapter addresses the question of how to generate concrete architectures with the IoT ARM, which is one of the many uses to which an architectural reference model can be put (see and ). This topic was already touched upon in Section “Generation of Architectures” in , but it is covered in greater depth in this section.

The first major contribution of the (IoT ARM) is the IoT Reference Model itself. Besides models, the IoT Reference Model provides the concepts and definitions on which IoT architectures can be built. This Chapter introduces the IoT Reference Model as a precondition for working with the Reference Architecture that is introduced in .

In this chapter we present our IoT Reference Architecture. This IoT Reference Architecture is, among others, designed as a reference for the generation of compliant IoT concrete architectures that are tailored to one’s specific needs. For other usages of the IoT Architectural Reference Model see .

Whereas we explained the process of creating an IoT architecture with the support of the IoT ARM in [Process Chapter] and gave an example how a concrete architecture can be defined based on different models and views of the IoT ARM in [Concrete Architecture Chapter], we now provide reference manuals with guidelines how to use the IoT Domain Model, the IoT Information Model, the IoT Communication Model and the Perspectives when creating a concrete architecture.

As discussed in Sect. and found in the literature, the functional view of a concrete architecture typically consists of three viewpoints: functional decomposition (viz. the logical structure), interfaces, and behaviour. Despite its significantly more abstract nature, we provide an analysis of these viewpoints for the IoT Reference Architecture in Sect. and [Annex C]. However, only rudimentary interaction analysis is presented in the latter section, focusing mostly on technical use cases within a single FG.