6. Conclusions
It is anticipated that in the near future the Internet of Things will widely be used as the network to connect billions of objects. All the services and contents will be available around us for current and upcoming applications. The new connection structure enables new ways for doing the tasks, working, social networking and entertainment, hence enabling a new lifestyle. The Internet of Things offers many possible applications, only few of which are currently deployed. In the future, there will be many applications for smart cities, such as intelligent energy control for buildings. An IoT system should be able to connect many heterogeneous devices through the internet, which explains the critical need for a flexible layered architecture. In this paper, an IoT architecture model has been described in which the things, the people and the cloud services are combined to facilitate application tasks. The architecture’s key components have been described with the application of smart cities in mind. After an overview of IoT software platforms and enabling technologies, some of the IoT challenges coming from IoT software and hardware immaturity have been described. The main promises of an efficient IoT system will be realizable when these problems will be overcome, hence establishing a secure, reliable and user-friendly IoT system, offering daily comfort and convenience to users.
