# Embracing the Future Internet of Things +
## 1 Introduction  
The Internet-of-Things (IoT) concept has been broadly adopted by heterogeneous communities due to its potential benefits. Progresses in technologies enabled the realization of today's IoT services. Nevertheless, new technical capabilities are needed to realize \"smarter\" IoT services or even open possibilities not viable today. In the current IoT, multiple data sources contribute sensing information and the sensed data is gathered into a single cloud service. Let us consider the example use case of environmental monitoring for noise pollution measurement in a city. Data from sources such as noise sensors and people's comments from social media are gathered in for the particular cloud service and these sources are used only for the city noise measurement purpose. In the future, on the other hand, produced data need tobe shared among multiple applications. Therefore, the linkage between objects, devices, edge devices, actuators, agencies, and services needs to evolve to many-to-many instead of the current many-to-one or on-to-one linkages. This unique characteristic requires transparent discovery and information exchanges opening to more opportunities for information mash-ups among interdependent and symbiotic cloud services. This article points out the technical deficiencies in the current IoT and proposes a _hyper-connected IoT framework_ which connects in synergy multiple interdependent services. The first technical capability lacking in the present systems is the ability to orchestrate data analytics among distributed and federated IoT systems [1], where the orchestration is automatically considering as parameters privacy rules, geographical IoT components topology [2], real-time constraints and Quality-of-Service. A second aspect that hampers the global IoT interconnection is the scarcity of information transparency that encompasses the semantic interoperability capabilities, which ensures consistent data exchange among heterogeneous systems, and the semantic mediation between IoT systems that enables interaction between different system interfaces. Finally, a third aspect is the management of IoT resources in a contextualized manner, in order to overcome the isolation of vertical IoT silos. It is necessary to seamlessly manage diversified information, from physical sensing data (such as temperature observations measured by a sensor on a street lamp post) to high-level contextual information (e.g., disaster detection and monitoring within a geographic area) inferred from the status of multiple things (both physical, and virtual such as social media data). Thus, to realize this vision IoT advancements on data analytics, standardization, and resource and context management are required. While this article focuses on smart cities as important realization of IoT services, the future IoT framework is envisioned for many different applications of IoT such as smart transportation, health-care, public services, smart commercial buildings, smart homes, and smart industry. As extension of our previous work [3], this article presents also two instances of hyper-connected IoT framework in smart cities and autonomous driving scenarios, both with a detailed depiction of their architecture and functionalities. In addition, we have made a deeper analysis of core concepts of the future IoT such as information transparency, where we have brought an actual example of semantic approach to context managing, and resource and context management, showing a seamless and transparent federation of different heterogeneous systems. We have then performed experiments assessing the performance impact of the federation of IoT systems in comparison with centralized IoT platform. Moreover, we have extended the open challenges discussion including the current advancements into standardization bodies and industrial associations that aim to address aspects of the challenges.