Internet of Things: Trends, Challenges and Opportunities

The technology around us evolves rapidly. More and more cheaper and smaller devices become available. These devices vary in many aspects, e.g., in size, computational power or operating mode and are connected to some kind of a network for communication and data transmission. We refer to such devices as smart objects, e.g., smart car, smart home, smart city, etc. Combined they form a complex infrastructure, known as Internet of Things (IoT). Huge amounts of data produced in the IoT provide significant challenges for processing and analysis. This paper gives an overview over the trends, challenges and opportunities in the field of IoT and serves as a starting point for our research in this field. We focus hereby on integration of IoT and Cloud computing, especially the extension of classic Cloud towards Fog and Edge computing.