Internet of Things Architecture

Application-

Independent

Model

Platform-

Independent

Model

Architectural

Reference Model

Concrete

Architecture

Platform-

Specific

Model

Implementation

Tr

an

sfo

rm

ati

on

Guidelines

Tr

an

sf

or

ma

tio

n

Figure 164 : Derivation of implementations (platform-specific models) from an

architectural reference model via the immediate step of a concrete architecture

(platform-independent model).

The transformation step from an application-independent model to a platform-
dependent model is informed by guidelines. The step from platform-
independent model to platform-specific model is discussed in Section D.4.3.

While the model presented in Figure 163 stops at the reference architecture, the
IoT ARM goes one step beyond and also defines a reference model. As already
discussed earlier, a reference model provides the grounding for a common
understanding of the IoT domain by modelling its concepts and their
relationships. A detailed description of the IoT Reference Model can be found in
Chapter 3.

D.3 Taxonomy of the IoT Architectural Reference Model

In the previous section we discussed how reference architectures relate to
architectures and real systems. In order to derive a reference architecture and
the reference model upon which the reference architecture builds, one needs to
understand better how they relate to each other and to external input.

A high-level taxonomy of how we understand the reference architecture process
is depicted in Figure 165. Such a taxonomy provides us with a high-level
perspective of actions and inputs needed for developing an ARM for IoT. As
discussed earlier, the IoT Reference Model provides guidance for the
description of the IoT Reference Architecture. The Guidelines inform the
derivation of IoT-A-compliant concrete architectures from the reference
architecture.