An Architecture for Interoperable IoT Ecosystems

The Internet of Things (IoT) is maturing and more and more IoT platforms that give access to things are emerging. However, the real potential of the IoT lies in growing IoT cross-domain ecosystems on top of these platforms that will deliver new, unanticipated value added applications and services. We identified two crucial aspects that are important to grow an IoT ecosystem: (i) interoperability to enable cross-platform and even cross-domain application developments on top of IoT platforms as well as (ii) marketplaces to share and monetize IoT resources. Having these two crucial pillars of an IoT ecosystem in mind, we present in this article the BIG IoT architecture as the foundation to establish IoT ecosystems. The architecture fulfills essential requirements that have been assessed among industry and research organizations as part of the BIG IoT project. We demonstrate a first proof-of-concept implementation in the context of an exemplary smart cities scenario.