THE CHALLENGE

Internet of Things (IoT) technologies have invaded our everyday life: from home automation and smart energy management, to smart transportation and environment monitoring. Devices like sensors and wearables, monitor and provide insights on several activities. In this promising landscape of evolving IoT solution, stakeholders face numerous challenges.

Smart object manufacturers have to select from a variety of protocols and technologies so as to render their products compatible with several IoT solutions. IoT solutions providers have to consider a wide number of sensor types so as to cover their needs and design extendable products that can incorporate future needs.

End users have to adopt a number of different web/mobile applications to use with all the IoT platforms they interact with. Recent research activities proposed new communication protocols and software architectures for IoT products with wider deployments. However, such proposals have not been widely adopted since the market will jeep supporting propriety solutions which bring short-to-midterm financial benefits. The resulting landscape consists of IoT islands unable to collaborate. symbIoTe comes to remedy this situation. Building on top of existing standards, it will enable the collaboration of different IoT platforms to meet cross-domain end user requirements, by forming IoT federations as well as adopting roaming concepts from other domains to the IoT world. symbIoTe is not opposed to standalone, successful solution; on the contrary, symbIoTe allows for intelligent and domain-specific IoT platforms to inter-operate. 

THE PROJECT

Through collaboration, IoT solutions will address the need of consumers for smooth and transparent transition across different platforms. IoT providers will benefit by expanding their customer base. Moreover, small IoT companies can overcome the market barriers and offer their innovative solutions. Finally, application developers will offer applications independent of specific technical requirements.

Project Coordinator

AIT – Austrian Institute of Technology GmbH