A. The role of the cloud
The emerging Cloud Computing paradigm represents a
strong accelerator for IoT development. In fact it enables the
creation of smart environments such as Smart Cities that
need to be able to combine the services offered by multiple
stakeholders and scale to support a large number of users in a
reliable and decentralized manner. People and devices can
use cloud resources as a well-known interface with the
Internet of Things services framework. In almost all
experimentation regarding IoT, services and resources are
often delivered in cloud style, mostly in case of social
services. Together with cloud services also big data
processing and storage technologies assume a critical role in
supporting the Internet of Things evolution. In fact, data
gathering from various sources in various formats, real time
processing, data mining, warehousing and analytics are
critical elements for building up services in the Internet of
Things scenario.
B. Challenges and limitations
As usual for emerging technologies that are disruptive
and pervasive even at the social level, there are several
technological and regulatory challenges to be addressed. The
most important of them are related to data ownership,
security, privacy and sharing of information.
On the technologies side, the main challenges include:
architecture, energy efficiency, security, protocols and QoS.
The standardization of new communication protocols and
global functional frameworks are question “in progress” at
both the research and experimentation level. In table 1 is
reported a taxonomy of short-range communication protocol
and their fields of applicability [18].