IoT-A and FIWARE: Bridging the Barriers between the Cloud and IoT Systems Design and Implementation

IoT systems are designed and implemented to address specific challenges based on domain specific requirements, thus not taking into consideration issues of openness, scalability, interoperability and use-case independence. As a result, they are less principled, vendor oriented and hardly replicable since the same IoT architecture cannot be used in more than one use-cases. To address the fragmentation of existing IoT solutions, the IoT-A project proposes an architecture reference model that defines the principles and standards for generating IoT architectures and promoting the interoperation of IoT solutions. However, IoTA addresses the architecture design problem, and does not focus on whether existing cloud platforms can offer the tools and services to support the implementation of IoT-A compliant IoT systems. In this work we attempt to fill this gap and we propose an architectural approach based on IoT-A that focuses (as a use case) on the FIWARE open cloud platform that in turn provides the building blocks of Future Internet (FI) applications and services. We further correlate FIWARE and IoT-A approaches to identify the key features for FIWARE to support IoT-A compliant system implementations.