A Survey of Foundation Models for IoT: Taxonomy and Criteria-Based Analysis
It provides a taxonomy and criteria-based analysis to help practitioners and researchers select and design foundation model solutions for IoT applications, but it is incremental as it synthesizes existing work rather than introducing new methods.
This survey addresses the lack of comparability and guidance for applying foundation models across IoT domains by organizing existing methods around four shared performance objectives: efficiency, context-awareness, safety, and security & privacy, enabling cross-domain analysis and practical insights for new tasks.
Foundation models have gained growing interest in the IoT domain due to their reduced reliance on labeled data and strong generalizability across tasks, which address key limitations of traditional machine learning approaches. However, most existing foundation model based methods are developed for specific IoT tasks, making it difficult to compare approaches across IoT domains and limiting guidance for applying them to new tasks. This survey aims to bridge this gap by providing a comprehensive overview of current methodologies and organizing them around four shared performance objectives by different domains: efficiency, context-awareness, safety, and security & privacy. For each objective, we review representative works, summarize commonly-used techniques and evaluation metrics. This objective-centric organization enables meaningful cross-domain comparisons and offers practical insights for selecting and designing foundation model based solutions for new IoT tasks. We conclude with key directions for future research to guide both practitioners and researchers in advancing the use of foundation models in IoT applications.