Anatomy of the connecting architecture of Internet of Things

Internet of Things (IoT) holds a promise that any consumer device can be connected to the Internet and accessed from any network at any time. Most of the state of the art research focuses on application-specific scenarios but a holistic architectural overview of how to connect different heterogeneous IoT networks to the Internet is still missing. In this paper, we present such an overview and a qualitative comparison of the proposed design models. Specifically, we compare three connectivity models, which we refer to as Link Model, Proxy Model and Full-IP Model, from the viewpoint of performance, scalability, applicability and hardware requirements, etc. Finally, we discuss the on-going trends and future challenges.