Bridging IoT islands: the symbIoTe project

The rapidly increasing interest that the Internet of Things (IoT) has received both in academia and industry over the past few years has already resulted in a huge number of IoT platforms which, however, typically are conceived as individual vertically integrated systems without supporting inter-platform collaboration and interaction. In this paper, we present the techno-economic approach of the EU project symbIoTe (Symbiosis of smart objects across IoT environments) which aims at designing a sustainable IoT ecosystem that will enable the inclusion of existing individual IoT platforms (“islands”) into federative structures via the use of a novel set of inter-system interfaces. The objective of symbIoTe is thereby to accomplish the two key criteria for the successful evolution of large ecosystems, i.e., backward compatibility and incremental deployability. In other words, the symbIoTe interfaces are designed to serve as stable evolutionary kernels which will enable diversity and dynamics, both in the space of applications and IoT platforms. Furthermore, we expect the symbIoTe interfaces and their corresponding logic to also play an important role in the next generation of the Internet of Things which will be comprised of things as actors in addition to the small devices addressed in the present things as sensors/actuators paradigm.