A Survey of IoT Frameworks for Low-Powered Devices

Thanks to technological advancements, our lives are getting more intertwined with the connected world as more smart devices are coming to market. As such, the clear separation of devices as things (end-devices in IoT systems) and human operated devices is getting increasingly buried. This led to the creation of the term Internet of Everything (IoE) which is defined by Cisco as the “the networked connection of people, process, data, and things†[1]. The main difference between IoT and IoE is inclusion of people in the ecosystem, which greatly increases the number of connected parties. This increase in connected parties creates a strain on our existing infrastructure which is relying on cloud computing for performing most operations. Even though this resource provides heaps of computational power, the weak link in this scenario is the network, where all the connected devices can easily overload the available bandwidth, leading to slow response speeds and low general availability. The answer to this problem lies with technology that already exists and is not yet fully exploited as a distributed computing powerhouse, IoT. This paper aims to summarise the concept of computing at the edge, common architectural patterns, existing solutions, while also discussing real-world applications.