Communication issues in the Internet of Things (IoT)

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a paradigm that is rapidly gaining momentum in the field of wireless communications. The enabling factors of this concept are the pervasive and ubiquitous deployment of a wide variety of wireless devices (such as Radio-Frequency IDentification (RFID) tags, sensors, actuators, mobile phones) around us. Many of these devices are able to interact/communicate with each other to reach common goals. A major driving force behind this promising paradigm is the ability to integrate several different devices, technologies, platforms and communications solutions. We focus on an analysis of the communication issues that support the IoT ecosystem. First, we review recent standardization efforts on the IoT protocol stack. We compare four recently proposed protocol stacks implemented on resource constrained devices in the IoT. We analyze different types of communications such as device to device, device to human and device to data storage that need to be supported in the IoT ecosystem. Based on this analysis, we highlight challenges and constraints that need to be addressed at the inter-domain communication level when developing current and future IoT solutions and applications. We also propose solutions that can be developed to address the challenges. Finally, we discuss the impact of emerging technologies on the IoT ecosystem.