An Exploration of IoT Platform Development
This work addresses the need for systematic development processes in IoT platforms, which are crucial for smart city initiatives, but it is incremental as it builds on existing surveys and frameworks.
The paper tackled the problem of developing and maintaining Internet of Things platforms by analyzing 63 approaches, proposing an evaluation framework to highlight their characteristics, strengths, and weaknesses, and providing insights and recommendations for quality-aware IoT platform development.
Internet of Things platforms are key enablers for smart city initiatives, targeting the improvement of citizens quality of life and economic growth. As IoT platforms are dynamic, proactive, and heterogeneous socio-technical artefacts, systematic approaches are required for their development. Limited surveys have exclusively explored how IoT platforms are developed and maintained from the perspective of information system development process lifecycle. In this paper, we present a detailed analysis of 63 approaches. This is accomplished by proposing an evaluation framework as a cornerstone to highlight the characteristics, strengths, and weaknesses of these approaches. The survey results not only provide insights of empirical findings, recommendations, and mechanisms for the development of quality aware IoT platforms, but also identify important issues and gaps that need to be addressed.