# Research Challenges for the Internet of Things: What Role Can OR Play?
## 2 The Internet of Things
### Research Challenges for the Future IoT  
There are many research challenges associated with the IoT. We know some of them now, others will emerge in the future. These cover the whole field, including the technical challenges of designing, managing and using a multi-national, multi-industry, multi-technology infrastructure, the business challenges of developing IoT business models, and the organizational, political and social challenges of a new technology which promises to change the way we live and work in major ways. Before we consider the role OR might play in supporting the IoT, the major research challenges must be identified. Many recent surveys of the IoT include a section on research challenges, and we have attempted to consolidate their results for our purposes. This was a difficult task due to differences in terminology by different authors, the fact that the different research challenges cannot be completely separated from each other, and the fact that they can be described at different levels of detail. For example, a very high level research challenge might be \"IoT design\", but this includes a number of lower level research challenges such as \"architecture\", \"interoperability\" and \"scalability\". Each of these lower level research challenges may include other still lower level research challenges, e.g., IEEE's Standard for an Architectural Framework for the IoT includes the research challenges of protection, security, privacy and safety [3]. Some authors consider IoT Standardization to be a research challenge in its own right, however we consider this to be a high level research challenge which encompasses many lower level research challenges and so do not list it separately. We discuss standardization in Section 2.3 below. The main survey papers on which we have drawn for our list of technical research challenges are the following: [PERSON] [4], [PERSON] [5], [PERSON] [6], [PERSON] [7], [PERSON] [8], [PERSON] [9], [PERSON] [10], [PERSON] [11] and [PERSON] [12]. Our consolidated list is shown in Table 1.  
Figure 1: Internet of Things growth (data from [[http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users/](http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users/)]([http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users/](http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users/)) and IoT stats: statista.com). The red bars show the number of human internet users for the period 1995–2020; the blue bars show the number of devices connected to the internet, while the trend lines show a logarithmic growth for human users and exponential growth for number of devices connected. \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c c c c c c c c} \hline \hline
**Papers Mentioning** & **[PERSON] 2014** & **[PERSON] 2014** & **[PERSON] 2014** & **[PERSON] 2010** & **[PERSON] 2013** & **[PERSON] 2013** & **[PERSON] 2014** & **[PERSON] 2016** & **[PERSON] 2015** \\ \hline \multicolumn{10}{c}{Design} \\ \hline Architecture & x & & x & & x & x & x & x & x \\ Interoper-ability & x & x & x & x & x & & x & x \\ Scalability & x & x & x & x & & & & & x \\ Mobility & x & x & x & x & & & & & x \\ Security/Privacy & x & x & x & x & x & x & x & x \\ \hline \multicolumn{10}{c}{Scientific/Engineeringering} \\ \hline Energy & & x & & x & & x & x & x & \\ Efficiency/Power & & x & & x & & & & x \\ Reliability/Robustness & x & & x & x & & & & x \\ \hline \multicolumn{10}{c}{Management/Operations} \\ \hline Software & & & & & x & & & x & \\ Development & & & & x & & & x \\ Availability & & & & & & & x \\ Data Management/ & & & & & & & x & \\ Information Fusion & x & x & x & x & & x & & \\ Cloud Computing & & x & & & & x & & \\ Performance & x & & & & & x & & x \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 1: The main IoT technical research challenges linked to the main papers mentioning them, marked as x. We have divided these research challenges into the categories of Design, Scientific/Engineering and Management/Operations, although this is somewhat artificial, as several research challenges belong to more than one category.