The Internet of Things as greenfield model: A categorization attempt for labeling smart devices

Prognoses predict the number of smart devices building the Internet of Things (IoT) to range between 30 and 50 billions in 2020, in the most conservative outlook triplicating today´s numbers of devices connected to the Internet in just 7 years. While hardware developments and new standards for network and application protocols are progressing well, there is little consensus about how such heterogeneous, wide-scale networks should be planned, administrated and integrated with traditional networks, but also with cloud based infrastructure in a holistic, end-to-end fashion. Thousands of different vendor hardware and software options and incompatible technological lifecycle time spans for smart things will result in serious challenges for device orchestration, management and network scaling. The framework for data collection, transmission and storage has already been raised as an elementary question when aspects of social acceptance and regulatory transparency are being discussed. In this paper we propose a basic, holistic categorization model for devices building the IoT which aims at addressing some of the challenges described by introducing an universal, simple, high-level labeling scheme which contains different flags specifying possible application or use cases, data flow and storage options, economic and ecologic parameters as well as management and control elements.