Characterizing cloud federation in IoT

Abstract

The advent of both Cloud computing and Internet of Things (IoT) is changing the way of conceiving information and communication systems. Generally, we talk about IoT Cloud to indicate a new type of distributed system consisting of a set of smart devices interconnected with a remote Cloud infrastructure, platform, or software through the Internet and able to provide IoT as a Service (IoTaaS). In this paper, we discuss the near future evolution of IoT Clouds towards federated ecosystems, where IoT providers cooperate to offer more flexible services. Moreover, we present a general three-layer IoT Cloud Federation architecture, highlighting new business opportunities and challenges.