Internet of Things – Architecture © - 46 -
2.2 Architecture concepts
This section elaborates on the structuring approach chosen for the IoT ARM.
Readers, who are instead interested in what methodology was used for deriving
the IoT ARM, find a thorough discussing of this topic in Appendix D.
Architectural views provide a standardised way for structuring architectural
descriptions [IEEE Architecture] [Rozanski 2012]. As demonstrated
by Shames & Yamada, views can also gainfully employed for structuring
reference-architecture descriptions [Shames 2004], and we decided to follow
their lead. This usage is also in concordance with approaches in other, related
modelling domains (see, for instance RM-ODP‘s approach, which is based on
five architectural views^1 [Raymond 1995]). Choosing architectural views for
the delineation of the IoT Reference Architecture was found to provide a large
degree of clarity to this document and views were also instrumental for planning
and divvying up the work at hand when developing the IoT ARM. Architectural
views provide an intuitive delineation of each aspect addressed. Furthermore,
by using architectural views in the IoT Reference Model (see Chapter 3 ) and the
IoT Architectural Reference Model (see Section 4 ), we ensured a high degree of
coherence throughout the entire IoT ARM document.
There is not a single, commonly accepted list of architectural views, so we
chose to consult the literature on related modelling domains for inspiration.
Among others we looked at RM-ODP [Raymond 1995] and models for space
systems (see, for instance, [Shames 2004]). We also consulted tutorial
literature on systems architecting, such as Rozanski & Woods‘s thorough
introduction to this topic [Rozanski 2012]. The architectural views finally
chosen were
Physical view^2 ; Context view; Functional view; Information view; Deployment view.(^1) Notice, that in deviation from the IEEE definition [IEEE Architecture], RM-ODP refers to views as
viewpoints. 2
The physical view is referred to as Physical-Entity View in the IoT ARM. The Physical Entity is part of the
IoT Domain Model and is introduced in Section 3.3.