The Internet of Things: Opportunities and Challenges for Distributed Data Analysis

Nowadays, data is created by humans as well as automatically collected by physical things, which embed electronics, software, sensors and network connectivity. Together, these entities constitute the Internet of Things (IoT). The automated analysis of its data can provide insights into previously unknown relationships between things, their environment and their users, facilitating an optimization of their behavior. Especially the real-time analysis of data, embedded into physical systems, can enable new forms of autonomous control. These in turn may lead to more sustainable applications, reducing waste and saving resources IoT's distributed and dynamic nature, resource constraints of sensors and embedded devices as well as the amounts of generated data are challenging even the most advanced automated data analysis methods known today. In particular, the IoT requires a new generation of distributed analysis methods. Many existing surveys have strongly focused on the centralization of data in the cloud and big data analysis, which follows the paradigm of parallel high-performance computing. However, bandwidth and energy can be too limited for the transmission of raw data, or it is prohibited due to privacy constraints. Such communication-constrained scenarios require decentralized analysis algorithms which at least partly work directly on the generating devices. After listing data-driven IoT applications, in contrast to existing surveys, we highlight the differences between cloudbased and decentralized analysis from an algorithmic perspective. We present the opportunities and challenges of research on communication-efficient decentralized analysis algorithms. Here, the focus is on the difficult scenario of vertically partitioned data, which covers common IoT use cases. The comprehensive bibliography aims at providing readers with a good starting point for their own work