Challenges in developing collaborative IoT systems

The Internet of Things (IoT) represents the next significant step in the evolution of the Internet. It will allow “things” to be connected anytime, anywhere, with anything and anyone, providing a myriad of novel applications and augmented services to citizens, governments, and enterprises. We believe that for the IoT to reach its full potential, it will be necessary to advance the investigation of techniques and technologies to build systems in such a brand-new scenario. In the IoT, the collaborating entities encompass both physical and virtual resources, interactions occur both in an active and programmed way as well as by chance, and therefore it is necessary to deal with expected but also emerging behaviors of the collaborating parties. In this paper, we first discuss the main features that make IoT a unique ecosystem, and as such, calls for new software development solutions. We claim that there is a need to rethinking the techniques and methodologies for developing IoT systems and applications. Novel models, architectural approaches and techniques should be proposed, or existing ones should be adapted to deal with the high heterogeneity, dynamism, serendipity and interdependencies that are typical of the IoT ecosystem. We then analyze and discuss potential key design solutions that deserve a deeper understanding in order to pave the way for the building of this new generation of systems. Our discussion is presented from a bottom-up perspective: from the modeling of devices that make up the $\mathrm{IoT}$ to the representation of requirements that must be addressed when engineering IoT systems.