IoT Architectural Framework: Connection and Integration Framework for IoT Systems

The proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT) has since seen a growing interest in architectural design and adaptive frameworks to promote the connection between heterogeneous IoT devices and IoT systems. The most widely favoured software architecture in IoT is the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), which aims to provide a loosely coupled systems to leverage the use and reuse of IoT services at the middle-ware layer, to minimise system integration problems. However, despite the flexibility offered by SOA, the challenges of integrating, scaling and ensuring resilience in IoT systems persist. One of the key causes of poor integration in IoT systems is the lack of an intelligent, connection-aware framework to support interaction in IoT systems. This paper reviews existing architectural frameworks for integrating IoT devices and identifies the key areas that require further research improvements. The paper concludes by proposing a possible solution based on microservice. The proposed IoT integration framework benefits from an intelligent API layer that employs an external service assembler, service auditor, service monitor and service router component to coordinate service publishing, subscription, decoupling and service combination within the architecture.