Introduction
Based on the business and technologies needs, the architecture of the IoT solution is designed. It is very critical for any enterprise or government organization to define the IoT architecture to fulfill their requirements. Therefore, Industry experts, researchers and architects have invented layer based architecture for IoT solutions. They highly recommend choosing and defining the architecture very intelligently.
Layer based architecture has following advantages:
- Segregation of requirements into various categories
- Identifying the technologies
- Defining the overall work flow of solution
- Planning & managing different activities
- Defining hardware & software requirements
- Estimating the approximate cost of overall infrastructure
- Minimize complexity and increase confidence level of stakeholders
What are the available IoT Layered architectures?
- 3 Layered Architecture
- 4 Layered Architecture
- 5 Layered Architecture
- 6 Layered Architecture
There is also 7 Layered architecture exits based on business requirement by adding a separate Edge Layer. All these architectures are evolved based on research and actual business requirements.
In most of the cases, 5 Layered architecture is used.
What are the different layers in IoT layered architectures and their hierarchies?
| 3 Layers Architecture | 4 Layers Architecture | 5 Layers Architecture | 6 Layers Architecture |
|---|---|---|---|
| Application Layer | Application Layer | Business Layer | Business Layer |
| Network Layer | Network Layer | Application Layer | Application Layer |
| Perception Layer | Support Layer | Processing/Middle-ware Layer | Security Layer |
| Perception Layer | Network Layer | Processing/Middle-ware Layer | |
| Perception Layer | Network Layer | ||
| Perception Layer |
Here, data flows in both directions from top to bottom and from bottom to top.
Description about different Layers
Perception Layer
IoT Devices (Sensors & Actuators) reside in this layer. These devices capture data and pass to the next layer.
Network Layer
This layer provides support for different wired & wireless network connectivity like ethernet, wifi, Bluetooth, BLE, Zigbee, sigfox, RFID, LoRAWAN, NB-IoT , 2G, 3G, LTE & 5G etc. This also includes different messaging transfer protocols i.e MQTT, CoAP, AMQP and DDS.
Processing Layer
This layer performs all types of activities that are required to generate structured data that can be shown to the user or administrator. These activities are data accumulation, parsing of different formats, filtering of data, data aggregation, storage of data and conversion of data in recipient format.
Support/Security Layer
This layer provides devices & user authentication along with authorization. It is also responsible for data protection (encryption & decryption) to support all types of cryptography based solutions to enhance security in complete solution. Nowadays, software and hardware based security is very much needed at IoT devices, Gateway, communication networks, message protocols as well as user interface level.
Application Layer
This layer provides an interface for end users to interact with IoT solutions. This interface enables the generation of information based on end user requirements. Here, the end user can be a customer who uses IoT enabled services or an administrator who manages and controls IoT components and overall operations.
Business Layer
This layer defines a set of rules, organization policies, defines security parameters, defines specification of data based on business or customer needs and use cases.
Technology 