Middleware technologies for cloud of things: a survey

The next wave of communication and applications will rely on new services provided by the Internet of Things which is becoming an important aspect in human and machines future. IoT services are a key solution for providing smart environments in homes, buildings, and cities. In the era of massive number of connected things and objects with high growth rate, several challenges have been raised, such as management, aggregation, and storage for big produced data. To address some of these issues, cloud computing emerged to the IoT as Cloud of Things (CoT), which provides virtually unlimited cloud services to enhance the large-scale IoT platforms. There are several factors to be considered in the design and implementation of a CoT platform. One of the most important and challenging problems is the heterogeneity of different objects. This problem can be addressed by deploying a suitable “middleware” which sits between things and applications as a reliable platform for communication among things with different interfaces, operating systems, and architectures. The main aim of this paper is to study the middleware technologies for CoT. Toward this end, we first present the main features and characteristics of middlewares. Next, we study different architecture styles and service domains. Then, we present several middlewares that are suitable for CoT-based platforms and finally, a list of current challenges and issues in the design of CoT-based middlewares is discussed.