Internet of Things (IoT) has become a continuously growing concept with the advancements of ubiquitous computing, wireless sensor networks, and machine-to-machine (M2M) communication. IoT connects heterogeneous physical devices and enables communication among them over the Internet via uniquely addressable identifiers. This paper delivers an overview of IoT in the context of the architecture and related technologies. However, IoT does not adhere to a universal architecture. Hence, it describes widely accepted architectural designs, further elaborated with the corresponding communication protocols and standards. Moreover, highly prevalent protocols and standards are summarized, so that the reader can gain an overall view of IoT. Furthermore, it describes some identified solutions and future directions towards overcoming the challenges present in the IoT paradigm. Finally, the paper concludes with some applications of IoT, in order to realize the feasibility of IoT concept in real-world scenarios.

The Internet of Things (IoT), inspired by the tremendous growth of connected heterogeneous devices, has pioneered the notion of smart city. Various components, i.e., smart transportation, smart community, smart healthcare, smart grid, etc. which are integrated within smart city architecture aims to enrich the quality of life (QoL) of urban citizens. However, real-time processing requirements and exponential data growth withhold smart city realization. Therefore, herein we propose a Big Data analytics (BDA)-embedded experimental architecture for smart cities. Two major aspects are served by the BDA-embedded smart city. Firstly, it facilitates exploitation of urban Big Data (UBD) in planning, designing, and maintaining smart cities. Secondly, it occupies BDA to manage and process voluminous UBD to enhance the quality of urban services. Three tiers of the proposed architecture are liable for data aggregation, real-time data management, and service provisioning. Moreover, offline and online data processing tasks are further expedited by integrating data normalizing and data filtering techniques to the proposed work. By analyzing authenticated datasets, we obtained the threshold values required for urban planning and city operation management. Performance metrics in terms of online and offline data processing for the proposed dual-node Hadoop cluster is obtained using aforementioned authentic datasets. Throughput and processing time analysis performed with regard to existing works guarantee the performance superiority of the proposed work. Hence, we can claim the applicability and reliability of implementing proposed BDA-embedded smart city architecture in the real world.

The emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) notion pioneered the implementation of various smart environments. Smart environments intelligibly accommodate inhabitants’ requirements. With rapid resource shrinkage, energy management has recently become an essential concern for all smart environments. Energy management aims to assure ecosystem sustainability, while benefiting both consumers and utility providers. Although energy management emerged as a solution that addresses challenges that arise with increasing energy demand and resource deterioration, further evolution and expansion are hindered due to technological, economical, and social barriers. This review aggregates energy management approaches in smart environments and extensively reviews a variety of recent literature reports on peak load shaving and demand response. Significant benefits and challenges of these energy management strategies were identified through the literature survey. Finally, a critical discussion summarizing trends and opportunities is given as a thread for future research.

The Web of Things (WoT) plays an important role in the representation of the objects connected to the Internet of Things in a more transparent and effective way. Thus, it enables seamless and ubiquitous web communication between users and the smart things. Considering the importance of WoT, we propose a WoT-based emerging sensor network (WoT-ESN), which collects data from sensors, routes sensor data to the web, and integrate smart things into the web employing a representational state transfer (REST) architecture. A smart home scenario is introduced to evaluate the proposed WoT-ESN architecture. The smart home scenario is tested through computer simulation of the energy consumption of various household appliances, device discovery, and response time performance. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme significantly optimizes the energy consumption of the household appliances and the response time of the appliances.

Maintaining a fair use of energy consumption in smart homes with many household appliances requires sophisticated algorithms working together in real time. Similarly, choosing a proper schedule for appliances operation can be used to reduce inappropriate energy consumption. However, scheduling appliances always depend on the behavior of a smart home user. Thus, modeling human interaction with appliances is needed to design an efficient scheduling algorithm with real-time support. In this regard, we propose a scheduling algorithm based on human appliances interaction in smart homes using reinforcement learning (RL). The proposed scheduling algorithm divides the entire day into various states. In each state, the agents attached to household appliances perform various actions to obtain the highest reward. To adjust the discomfort which arises due to performing inappropriate action, the household appliances are categorized into three groups i.e., (1) adoptable, (2) un-adoptable, (3) manageable. Finally, the proposed system is tested for the energy consumption and discomfort level of the home user against our previous scheduling algorithm based on least slack time phenomenon. The proposed scheme outperforms the Least Slack Time (LST) based scheduling in context of energy consumption and discomfort level of the home user.