Tag Archives: IOT Connectivity

Layered architectures of IoT

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:

  1. Segregation of requirements into various categories
  2. Identifying the technologies
  3. Defining the overall work flow of solution
  4. Planning & managing different activities
  5. Defining hardware & software requirements
  6. Estimating the approximate cost of overall infrastructure
  7. Minimize complexity and increase confidence level of stakeholders

What are the available IoT Layered architectures?

  1. 3 Layered Architecture
  2. 4 Layered Architecture
  3. 5 Layered Architecture
  4. 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 Architecture4 Layers Architecture5 Layers Architecture6 Layers Architecture
Application LayerApplication LayerBusiness LayerBusiness Layer
Network LayerNetwork LayerApplication LayerApplication Layer
Perception LayerSupport LayerProcessing/Middle-ware LayerSecurity Layer
Perception LayerNetwork LayerProcessing/Middle-ware Layer
Perception LayerNetwork Layer
Perception Layer
Table 1.0 Layered Architectures

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.