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The Emerging Internet of Things Marketplace From an Industrial Perspective: A Survey

Charith Perera, Chi Harold Liu, Srimal Jayawardena

arXiv:1502.00134v1cs.CY

TL;DR

This paper addresses the need to understand technologies, functionalities, applications, trends, opportunities, and open challenges in the emerging IoT marketplace. It surveys over one hundred IoT solutions, classifies them into five application categories, and examines their technologies and business models. The survey identifies concentration in wearable and smart home solutions, increasing investment in smart home, office, and supply-chain applications, and major unresolved privacy and security challenges.

  • Problem

    The emerging IoT marketplace lacks a systematic understanding of its solutions, technologies, functionalities, applications, trends, opportunities, and open research challenges.

  • Method

    The paper surveys over one hundred marketplace IoT solutions, classifies them into five application categories, and examines their functionalities, technologies, and business models.

  • Results

    The survey finds that wearable and smart home solutions are concentrated in the marketplace, while WiFi and Bluetooth are the most common communication protocols and most solutions use custom hardware and software.

  • Takeaways & Limitations

    The survey provides a conceptual framework for future IoT research and identifies opportunities involving smart home, office, supply-chain, privacy, and security developments.

Abstract

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The Internet of Things (IoT) is a dynamic global information network consisting of internet-connected objects, such as Radio-frequency identification (RFIDs), sensors, actuators, as well as other instruments and smart appliances that are becoming an integral component of the future internet. Over the last decade, we have seen a large number of the IoT solutions developed by start-ups, small and medium enterprises, large corporations, academic research institutes (such as universities), and private and public research organisations making their way into the market. In this paper, we survey over one hundred IoT smart solutions in the marketplace and examine them closely in order to identify the technologies used, functionalities, and applications. More importantly, we identify the trends, opportunities and open challenges in the industry-based the IoT solutions. Based on the application domain, we classify and discuss these solutions under five different categories: smart wearable, smart home, smart, city, smart environment, and smart enterprise. This survey is intended to serve as a guideline and conceptual framework for future research in the IoT and to motivate and inspire further developments. It also provides a systematic exploration of existing research and suggests a number of potentially significant research directions.

I. INTRODUCTION

The paper addresses a gap in IoT surveying by examining market-ready industrial solutions rather than primarily academic proposals. It collects market evidence to classify technologies, functionalities, trends, opportunities, and open challenges.

  • IoT Context: IoT connects large numbers of objects, sensors, and devices through communications and information infrastructure to provide value-added services.Connectivity is identified as critical to the IoT vision of connected objects communicating with minimal human intervention.
  • Research Gap: No prior survey had focused on IoT industry solutions, whose market-driven products are often absent from academic publications.The reviewed organisations include start-ups, small and medium enterprises, and large corporations.
  • Approach: The survey gathers information from websites, demonstration videos, technical specifications, and consumer reviews.These sources are used to understand how technologies are deployed in marketplace solutions.
  • Scope: The paper examines solution functionalities, technologies, and business perspectives to identify industry trends and opportunities.Its organisation covers functionality evaluation, hardware and software platforms, communication protocols, energy sources, business models, and later trends.

II. FUNCTIONALITY REVIEW OF IOT SOLUTIONS

The functionality review organises IoT products into common themes across wearable and smart-home applications. Wearables span many body locations and functions, while smart-home platforms combine sensing, software, and context-aware actions.

  • Review Structure: The review organises IoT solutions into common themes rather than describing every product in detail.Citation numbers allow readers to trace individual solutions across the paper.
  • Smart Wearable: Wearable solutions target the head, eyes, wrist, waist, hands, fingers, legs, and clothing, supporting diverse purposes.Table I summarises each solution’s description, gathered context, similar solutions, and context-aware functionality.
  • Smart Home: Smart-home solutions aim to make living more convenient and pleasant, with additional attention to elderly assistance and healthcare monitoring.Their market growth is linked in the passage to substantial consumer-market potential.
  • Smart Home: Generic platforms combine hardware, sensors, and software applications so context can trigger reasoning and actions across smart-home or building domains.SmartThings, NinjaBlocks, and Twine support customisable applications; HomeOS provides home automation through software on a normal PC.
  • Smart Wearable: Wearables cover fitness, medical monitoring, activity tracking, sleep, posture, sports assistance, emergency detection, and medication adherence.Examples include heart-rate tracking, crash alerts, posture advice, and sensor-enabled medication monitoring.
  • Smart Home: Smart-home objects provide remote and context-aware control, while virtual assistants combine voice interaction with environmental sensing.Examples include WeMo, Tado, Ubi, and Netatmo.

C. Smart City

Smart-city IoT solutions address urban management through sensing, platforms, traffic services, resource management, and activity monitoring. They connect real-time context to navigation, operational control, and analysis of urban life.

  • Urban Context: Urban pressure and concentrated resources have encouraged government and private-sector investment in information and communication technologies for sustainable city management.The passage frames smart-city initiatives as responses to growing problems in urban living.
  • Smart Traffic: Smart-traffic solutions use sensors, maps, and mobile applications for parking guidance, ride requests, traffic updates, and remote traffic-equipment management.Examples include ParkSight, Uber, and Alltrafficsolutions.
  • Platforms: Libelium, ThingWorx, and Xively provide sensing or cloud platforms that collect, process, analyse, and manage data across protocols.Libelium focuses on low-level sensor data collection, while ThingWorx and Xively are cloud-based.
  • Resource Management: Smart-city resource-management systems support real-time waste collection and remotely managed, energy-efficient street lighting.SmartBelly uses fill-level sensing and location information; Echelon manages street-light networks.
  • Activity Monitoring: Activity-monitoring systems analyse citizen-generated or location-based context to characterise urban usage and show real-time information about places.Livehoods analyses check-in patterns, while Scenetap reports characteristics of locations.

D. Smart Environment

Smart-environment solutions use distributed sensing and analysis for air and water quality, natural-disaster monitoring, and farming. Their applications combine real-time observations with alerts, management, and historical analysis.

  • Air Quality Monitoring: Community air-quality systems measure pollutants such as carbon monoxide and nitrogen dioxide outside homes or through mobile and municipal sensing platforms.Aircasting also records, maps, and shares health and environmental data.
  • Water Quality Monitoring: Water-monitoring systems collect real-time, high-resolution data on water quality, flow, speed, temperature, and pollution.Floating Sensor Network uses mobile sensing drifters, while Intelligentriver supports monitoring, analysis, and management of water resources.
  • Natural Disaster Monitoring: Natural-disaster systems detect hazards such as landslides and forest fires using multiple environmental sensors and fused context information.AmritaWNA issues alerts about possible rain-caused landslides; Insightrobotics detects forest fires.
  • Smart Farming: Smart-farming systems monitor vineyard temperature, soil moisture, leaf wetness, and solar radiation to support remote alerts and historical analysis.Microstrain combines collected conditions for real-time context-aware functions and retrospective analysis.

E. Smart Enterprise

Enterprise IoT solutions support infrastructure and general-purpose industrial functions across transportation, safety, energy, production, and resource management. They collect contextual data to monitor operations, manage assets, and support real-time decisions.

  • Enterprise IoT solutions support infrastructure and general-purpose functions such as management and connectivity in industrial places.
  • Transportation and Logistics: Transportation and logistics solutions collect environmental and location data for shipment tracking, traffic management, freight services, and remote stock monitoring.Senseaware tracks shipments using location, temperature, light, humidity, and biometric pressure; other systems support roads, traffic, freight, and vending-machine replenishment.
  • Infrastructure and Safety: Infrastructure and safety solutions monitor structural loads, building systems, energy use, motion, and surveillance through embedded and ambient sensors.
  • Energy and Production: Energy and production solutions use appliance- and machine-level metering and real-time sensor processing to predict usage, balance loads, and detect problems.
  • Resources Management: Resource-management solutions apply contextual data such as soil moisture, weather, energy, and animal activity to support smart farming and livestock monitoring.

III. TECHNOLOGY REVIEW OF IOT SOLUTIONS

The technology review compares how surveyed IoT solutions use technologies and solution models. It applies taxonomy-based criteria and distinguishes product, service, and combined offerings where information is available.

  • The review compares technology usage and solution models across the surveyed IoT solutions rather than detailing each technology.
  • Table III presents results using review criteria defined in Table II.
  • Solutions marketed as products are marked P, services as S, and offerings with both components may contain both; unavailable information is marked −.

IV. TRENDS AND LESSONS LEARNED

The paper organizes marketplace trends along two dimensions: application domains, functionalities, and value, and the technologies used.

  • Marketplace trends are categorized by domains, functionalities, and value.
  • Marketplace trends are also categorized by technology.
  • The trend analysis therefore combines application-oriented and technology-oriented perspectives.

1) Domains, Functionalities, and Value:

IoT marketplace solutions are usually narrow in functionality, while generic platforms support smart-home and smart-city applications. Wearable and smart-home offerings are more common than solutions for complex industrial or outdoor domains.

  • Most IoT solutions focus narrowly on providing one functionality.
  • Generic platforms such as Ninja Blocks, SmartThings, and Twine support smart-home and smart-city applications.
  • Wearable and smart-home solutions are more prevalent, partly because of larger consumer-market potential and lower development costs.
  • Smart-enterprise, smart-environment, and smart-city solutions require more effort and time because of complexity and domain-specific challenges.Challenges include hardware sustainability outdoors, energy availability in remote locations, and hardware maintenance and repair.

2) Technology: Hardware and Software Platforms:

The surveyed IoT marketplace solutions commonly combine custom hardware and software, connect through widely used wireless protocols, and use mobile, cloud, and multi-platform software components. Communication patterns often move sensor data through smartphones, gateways, or cloud services to deliver visualization, alerts, and actuation.

  • Hardware and software platforms: Most surveyed IoT solutions include both custom hardware and software.
  • Communication protocols: WiFi and Bluetooth are the most commonly used communication protocols among the surveyed solutions.
  • Software platforms and business models: Many solutions support multiple platforms, especially Android and iOS, while most remain closed-source and are sold primarily as hardware units.Cloud-only solutions are an exception, commonly charging subscription fees.
  • Smart wearable architecture: Wearable solutions commonly use sensors to capture context, smartphones to process or visualize data, and notifications to present outcomes to users.
  • Gateway and cloud communication: Some solutions route sensor data through custom gateways and home WiFi to cloud services, which then alert users’ mobile devices in real time.Mimobaby is given as an example of this gateway-to-cloud communication pattern.
  • Platform ecosystems: Cloud IoT platforms increasingly support third-party plugin ecosystems and no-code or low-code assembly of IoT components.

V. OPEN RESEARCH CHALLENGES

The paper identifies modularity and interoperability as central open challenges across IoT hardware and software layers. It argues that cross-vendor components, composable cloud services, standardization, and semantic or mediation technologies are needed to reduce barriers and improve flexibility.

  • Modularity and layered interoperability: Modularity is presented as a key IoT challenge because hardware should combine modules from different vendors without vendor lock-in.The paper links this flexibility to lower marketplace entry barriers, greater creativity, and reduced costs through competition.
  • Modularity and layered interoperability: Modularity lets organizations specialize in individual IoT components rather than repeatedly building complete end-to-end solutions.
  • Modularity and layered interoperability: Consumers gain more choices when modular systems allow them to select modules according to factors such as reliability.
  • Modularity and layered interoperability: At the software and cloud-services layer, users should be able to use services independently or compose multiple services according to their priorities.The paper identifies standardization, semantic technologies, mediators, and adapters as ways to improve interoperability.
  • Modularity and layered interoperability: Cross-platform compatibility remains unsupported despite partial hardware modularity and emerging partnerships between sensing-hardware and cloud-IoT providers.

2) Unified Multi-Protocol Communication Support:

The paper highlights unified communication support as an open challenge because IoT solutions use diverse wireless protocols with different capabilities and incompatibilities. It also connects sustainable IoT adoption to business models that enable secure data sharing and broader marketplace value.

  • Unified Multi-Protocol Communication Support: IoT solutions use wireless protocols including WiFi, Bluetooth, 3G, Zigbee, and Z-Wave, but incompatibility makes application development more challenging.The protocols differ in their advantages and disadvantages, including communication range and efficiency.
  • Unified Multi-Protocol Communication Support: Designing protocols and systems for wireless industrial communications is identified as important for successful IoT adoption.
  • Sustainable Business Models: A sustainable business model is considered essential for building a sustainable IoT paradigm.
  • Sustainable Business Models: Secure, privacy-preserved data exchange could add value to narrowly focused IoT solutions and help maintain infrastructure over the long term.The paper describes multi-sided marketplaces in which institutions can purchase data generated by public infrastructure or households.

4) Ownership, Privacy and Security:

The survey identifies privacy and security as major unresolved IoT challenges, including data protection, solution security, anonymisation, ownership transfer, and legal safeguards. It also reports market patterns across five categories, with strong emphasis on wearables, indoor smart spaces, and supply-chain management.

  • Ownership, Privacy and Security: Privacy and security remain major technical, social, and legal challenges, spanning data security and the security of sensing, communication, authentication, and actuation.The paper warns that breaches in fully automated IoT systems can have life-threatening and devastating economic and social impacts.
  • Ownership, Privacy and Security: Anonymisation should prevent household data from being traced to exact individuals or households, while still allowing broad geographic grouping.The paper also identifies ownership transfer and legal protections for consumers and their data as related requirements.
  • Market Patterns: The marketplace survey classifies IoT solutions into five categories: smart wearable, smart home, smart city, smart environment, and smart enterprise.The authors discuss each category’s functionalities and contributions to consumer lifestyles and society.
  • Market Patterns: Wearable solutions are proliferating, while investment focuses strongly on indoor smart home and office domains compared with environmental monitoring.The paper notes that wearable products reached the consumer market only recently despite wearable computing’s longer history.
  • Market Patterns: Supply-chain management receives substantial research-and-development investment, especially for real-time data collection, reasoning, and monitoring by large-scale industry players.The paper expects most value creation to occur with large industries until household consumers adopt IoT solutions.
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