Models for Internet of Things Environments—A Survey

Today, the Internet of Things (IoT) is an emerging topic in research and industry. Famous examples of IoT applications are smart homes, smart cities, and smart factories. Through highly interconnected devices, equipped with sensors and actuators, context-aware approaches can be developed to enable, e.g., monitoring and self-organization. To achieve context-awareness, a large amount of environment models have been developed for the IoT that contain information about the devices of an environment, their attached sensors and actuators, as well as their interconnection. However, these models highly differ in their content, the format being used, for example ontologies or relational models, and the domain to which they are applied. In this article, we present a comparative survey of models for IoT environments. By doing so, we describe and compare the selected models based on a deep literature research. The result is a comparative overview of existing state-of-the-art IoT environment models.