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Developing IoT applications: Challenges and Frameworks.

Itorobong S. Udoh 1*, Gerald Kotonya 2

1
School of Computing and Communications, Lancaster University, Bailrigg, Lancaster LA1 4YW, Lancaster,
United Kingdom
2
School of Computing and Communications, Lancaster University, Bailrigg, Lancaster LA1 4YW, Lancaster,
United Kingdom
*
i.udoh@lancaster.ac.uk

Abstract: Internet of Things (IoT) is creating new opportunities for developing innovative applications by leveraging on
existing and new technologies. In recent years, a variety of consumer and industrial IoT applications have been developed
and deployed. Despite much progress, developing IoT applications is still a complex, time-consuming and a challenging
activity. This is because IoT systems involve a wide range of hardware and software components, depending on a variety of
communication and distributed system technologies. Many IoT application frameworks of varying approaches, have been
developed to manage the complexities of developing IoT applications. However, there remains a paucity of surveys on
these IoT application development frameworks. This paper presents a comprehensive review and a comparative analysis of
existing IoT application development frameworks and toolkits, illustrating their strengths and weaknesses. This study will
assist in finding the most appropriate IoT application development paradigm for the desired IoT application. Finally, future
research directions are highlighted to improve existing and future frameworks and toolkits for IoT applications.

Technologies that (i) enable things in IoT systems to share

1. Introduction
The central idea of Internet of things (IoT) is to
connect existing and future physical objects to the internet.
The authors in [1] describes the IoT as the integration of
large numbers of real world objects onto the Internet, with
the aim of turning high-level interactions with the physical
world into a matter as simple as interacting with the virtual
world . IoT creates an interconnection between the physical
world of things with the virtual world of information. With
IoT, physical world objects can be embedded with
identification, sensing, networking and computing
capabilities that will allow them to communicate with one
another over the Internet to accomplish some objectives [2].
Everyday objects (these include electronic devices e.g.
mobile phones, advanced technological systems e.g.
automobiles and objects one may not naturally think as
electronic such as clothes, trees and books) will share
information, providing a wealth of intelligence for planning
and making context related decisions. Transforming
everyday objects into smart objects holds enormous
promises and benefits such as improving the quality of our
lives and optimising business processes. Ultimately, the goal
of IoT is to enable “things” to be connected anytime,
anywhere, with anything and anyone, using any
path/network and any service [3]. The complete
actualization of this vision will require significant research
advancement in technologies from which IoT has its root
and other emerging technologies.
A number of these underlying technologies are not
completely new. Technologies such as RFID (Radio
Frequency Identification), machine-to-machine(M2M)
communication, wireless sensor and actuator networks and
pervasive computing, have been applied to several
application domains, ranging from industrial and
manufacturing context for assets tracking to consumer
electronics for automation and monitoring. The authors in [3]
broadly grouped IoT technologies into three categories.
and acquire contextual information, (ii)enable things in IoT
systems to process contextual information, and (iii) improve
the quality attributes of IoT systems. The first two
categories are jointly understood as the functional building
blocks of IoT. The third category is not a functional but
rather the generally accepted requirements, without which
the penetration of the IoT would be severely reduced. IoT
enabling technologies will be powered by IoT applications
in delivering the benefits of IoT [4].
IoT applications have been developed and deployed
in several domains such as transportation and logistics,
healthcare, retail and supply chain, industry and
environment[5],[6]. Despite their pervasiveness, developing
IoT applications remains challenging and time-consuming.
This is because it involves dealing with several related
issues, such as lack of proper identification of roles of
various stakeholders, as well as the lack of appropriate
frameworks to address the large scale and heterogeneity in
IoT systems [7]. Another major challenge is the difficulty in
achieving effective programming abstractions at different
technology layers, ranging from device software to
middleware services and end user applications [8]. These
difficulties increase the development time, resources and
delay the deployment of the IoT applications. The
complexity of IoT applications implies that it is
inappropriate to develop one in an ad hoc manner and as a
result, a framework is required. An IoT application
framework can simplify the difficult process of coping with
heterogeneous devices and software components,
overcoming the complexities of distributed systems
technologies, handling a high volume of data, designing an
architecture for the application, implementing it in a
program, writing specific code to validate the application,
and finally deploying it. A number of researchers have
proposed several IoT application frameworks with each
having its own strength and weakness. A study of the
various application development framework for IoT is an

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important step for designing and developing a high-quality
IoT application.
There is a growing number of frameworks for IoT
application development. However, there is little research
efforts that surveys these frameworks. Nonetheless, surveys
such as [9][10] explored and examined programming
platforms. The survey in [9] considers the architectural
perspective of IoT programming platforms such as Works
with Nest [11], Allseen Alljoyn [12] and ARM mbed IoT
Device Platform[13]. The authors propose a taxonomy that
identifies the essential architectural aspect of these IoT
programming platforms. In [10], the authors present a
review of embedded device programming languages and
polyglot programming. The authors discuss some of the
requirements for an IoT programming platform, with a
general survey on the existing IoT programming platforms.
These surveys do not capture recent IoT application
development frameworks and toolkits such as [4], [8], [34]-
[39] that supports the software engineering approach of
developing IoT applications. Furthermore, surveys on IoT
application development framework have been limited to the
programming environment.
This paper aims to provide a comprehensive survey
on the state of the art framework that manages IoT
application development from the conception phase to the
deployment, presenting their supported features and
limitations. This study will review and compare the different
approaches used in developing IoT applications.
This paper has been organised into six major sections.
While the second section describes the IoT technological
architecture, the third section presents the important IoT
applications requirements. Section IV focuses on the
challenges of building IoT application. Section V provides a
comprehensive review of the existing IoT application
development frameworks. Finally, Section VI summarises
the paper and outlines future improvements.
Fig. 1. IoT Technology Architecture.
2. Internet of Things Technological Ecosystem
There are several published papers that address the
enabling technologies of IoT. In [14] [15], the authors
present the IoT identification technologies focusing on
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RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) and its applications.
The authors in [16] provide many identification techniques
that are available for IoT such as Ubiquitous Codes (uCode)
and electronic Product codes (EPC). Closely associated with
IoT identification is addressing. Addressing methods of IoT
objects include IPv6 and 6LoWPAN. Since identification
methods are not globally unique, addressing methods assists
in uniquely identifying IoT Objects.
Sensor networks will perform an important role in
IoT systems. They represent the interface between the
physical and the virtual world. While [17] addresses the
evolution and application of Wireless Sensor Network
(WSN) in IoT, the authors in [18] discuss the use of Wi-Fi
WSN in IoT vertical domains, which include smart
agriculture, smart grid and intelligent environmental
protection. Another fundamental technology for IoT is the
communication technology. It aims at connecting
heterogeneous devices together to deliver a set of specific
IoT operations. A review of several communication
technologies and a detailed illustration of how objects with
different communication protocols can be coupled together
to provide the desired functionalities are presented in [19].
The middleware abstracts the functionalities of things
as services and aids in addressing some of the key IoT
challenges such as interoperability, integration,
heterogeneity, scalability, security and privacy and context-
awareness. The survey of [20] outlined the requirements for
IoT middleware (such as resource discovery, service
discovery, resource management and data management) and
presented a detailed review of IoT middleware solutions
against the identified requirements. Emerging technologies
such as big data analytics [21] and fog computing [22] are
accelerating the progress towards bringing IoT into our daily
lives. From a structural perspective, these enabling
technologies constitute the IoT technology layered
architecture as shown in Fig.1.
It is worth noting that IoT components (hardware,
communication, software and data) are not restricted to a
particular layer. For example, the software component can
be found in the physical layer as device application, in the
communication layer as edge applications, in the platform
layer as cloud applications and in the application layer as
end user applications
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In order to provide high-quality services to the end
users, IoT system's design and development must be quality
driven. Therefore, quality attributes such as reliability,
security and adaptability must be identified and clearly
defined across all the levels of IoT technology architecture
to achieve the system purpose.
Clearly defining the boundaries between layers is a
difficult challenge because the abstraction layer are often
intermixed and in some cases, an IoT component across the
different layers can be integrated together. For instance, an
IoT application can be implemented as both a device
application and an edge application.
3. IoT Application Requirements
The nature of the technology architecture contributes
to the essential requirements of IoT applications. Based on
the characteristics of IoT technology ecosystem such as
heterogeneity, enormous scale, high volume of data and
dynamism as described in [3],[6],[20], a set of essential
requirements for IoT applications is described. These
requirements combined with quality attributes as defined in
[23] can be used to develop a set of high-level requirements
for IoT applications. The list is not exhaustive but includes
the vitally essential requirements.
3.1. Security
Privacy, trust, confidentiality and integrity are
considered important security principles for IoT due to the
large number of devices, services and people connected to
the internet [24]. These principles are the top priority and
essential requirements for IoT applications [25]. Since IoT
application uses data in various forms, speed and from a
variety of sources, it is important it incorporates trust
mechanisms that enforce privacy and confidentiality. In
addition, IoT application must integrate mechanisms to
check for the integrity of data to avoid the erroneous
operation of IoT applications.
3.2. Adaptability
IoT systems will consist of several nodes, which will
be resource constrained mobile and wirelessly connected to
the Internet. Due to factors such as poor connectivity and
power shortage, nodes can be connected and disconnected
from the system arbitrarily. Furthermore, the state, location
and computing speed of these nodes can change
dynamically. All these factors can make IoT systems to be
extremely dynamic. In a physical environment that is highly
dynamic, IoT application needs to be self-adaptive to
manage the communication between the nodes and the
services using them. [3] presents that IoT applications need
to designed and developed in a way that it can efficiently
and effectively react in a timely manner to the continuously
changing context in accordance with, for instance, business
policies or performance objectives that are defined by
humans. IoT applications should be self-optimizing, self-
protecting, and self- configuring, resilient and energy-
efficient.
3.3. Intelligence
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Intelligent things and system of systems are the
building blocks of Internet of things [26]. IoT applications
will power IoT enabling technologies in transforming
everyday objects into smart objects that can understand and
obtain intelligence by making or enabling context related
decisions, resulting in the execution of tasks independently
without human intervention. Achieving this requires IoT
application to be designed and developed with intelligent
decision-making techniques such as context-aware
computing service, predictive analytics, complex event
processing and behavioural analytics.
3.4. Real time
A number of IoT domains requires the timely
delivery of data and services. For instance, consider IoT in
scenarios such as telemedicine, patient care and vehicle-to-
vehicle communications where a delay in seconds can have
dangerous consequences Environments where operations are
time-critical will require IoT applications that provide on-
time delivery of data and services.
3.5. Regulation Compliant
IoT applications may collect sensitive personal
information about people daily activities such as detailed
household energy usage profile and travel history. Many
people consider this information as confidential. When such
information is exposed to the Internet, there is a possibility
of privacy leakage and this could affect the privacy of the
individual. In order not to violate the privacy of people, IoT
applications must be compliant with the privacy
requirements established by law such as EU data protection
rules [27], otherwise, they could be prohibited.
4. Challenges of IoT Application Development
IoT’s application requirements as previously
described combined with the inherent qualities of IoT
technology infrastructure makes the development of IoT
application not an easy task. These characteristics create a
set of challenges for the IoT application stakeholders as
discussed below:
4.1. Inherently Distributed
IoT applications are typically distributed across
several component systems. Basically, some IoT application
components will be implemented in the cloud/fog. While
functionalities such as real-time analysis and data
acquisition are implemented in the IoT device, the
application components that allows the end users to interact
with the IoT system will be implemented, usually as a
separate web, mobile or standalone application. IoT
applications may also be distributed over a wide and varying
geographical area [10]. As they are distributed, the classical
approach of a centralised development methodology dealing
with all these software components may no longer be
applicable. In addition, designing and implementing
distributed applications capable of taking consistent
decisions from non-centralised resources is not always an
easy task.
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4.2. Deep Heterogeneity
One of the major challenges in the realisation of IoT
applications is the interoperability among IoT devices using
a variety of technologies [28].IoT applications involve
interactions among heterogeneous devices, providing and
consuming services deployed in a heterogeneous network
(such as fixed, wireless and mobile). This heterogeneity
emanates not only from the difference in features and
capabilities but also for other reasons such as the
manufacturer’s and vendors’ products and QoS
requirements since they do not always follow the same
standards and protocols. [29].Device and communication
heterogeneity can make the portability of IoT applications
difficult to achieve.
4.3. Data Management
The data generated from these heterogeneous devices
are generally in huge volume, in various forms, and are
generated at different speeds. IoT application will often
make critical decisions based on the data collected and
processed. Sometimes, these data can be corrupted for
various reasons such as the failure of a sensor, introduction
of an invalid data by a malicious user, delay in data delivery
and wrong data format. Consequently, IoT application
developers are faced with the challenge of developing
methods that establish the presence of invalid data and new
techniques that capture the relationship between the data
collected and the decision to be made.
4.4. Application Maintenance
IoT applications will be executed on distributed
systems consisting of millions of devices interacting in rich
and complex ways. Gartner predicted that 26 billion devices
would be connected to the Internet by 2020[30]. Since IoT
applications will be distributed over a wide geographical
area, there are concerns relating to the feasibility of
application deployment that supports corrective and
adaptive maintenance. The codes running on these devices
will have to be debugged and updated regularly. However,
maintenance operations present a number of challenges.
Allowing devices to support remote debugging and
application updates poses significant privacy and security
challenges. In addition, interactive debugging may be
difficult due to the limited bandwidth of these devices.
4.5. Humans in the Loop
Many IoT applications are human-centric
applications, i.e. humans and objects will work in synergy
[31]. However, the dependencies and interactions between
humans and objects are yet to be fully harmonised. Humans
in the loop have its advantage. For example, in healthcare,
in-cooperating models of various human activities and
assisted technologies in the homes of the elderly can
improve their medical conditions. However, IoT
applications that model human behaviour is a significant
challenge, as it requires modelling of complex behavioural,
psychological and physiological aspects of human nature
[32]. New research is necessary to in-cooperate human
behaviours in IoT application design and to understand the
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underlying requirements and complex dependencies
between IoT application and humans.
4.6. Application Inter-dependency
Inter-dependency problem may arise when several
IoT applications share services from real world objects.
Consider two IoT applications running concurrently in a
home: an energy management application for regulating the
energy consumption of the electrical and electronics
appliances and a health care application for monitoring the
vital signs of the occupants of the house. To reduce the cost
of deployment and channel contention, these applications
share the information from the sensors in the home.
However, integrating both applications is challenging since
each application has its own assumptions about the real
world and may have no knowledge of how the other
application works. For example, the home health care
application may detect depression and decide to turn ON all
the lights. On the other hand, the energy management
application may decide to turn OFF lights when no motion
is detected. Detecting and resolving such dependency
problems is important for the correctness of operation of
interacting IoT systems [33].
4.7. Multiple Stakeholders Concern
The development of IoT applications involves
various stakeholders with different and sometimes
conflicting concerns and expectations. [34] identified the
stakeholders of IoT application development, which include;
domain expert, software designer, application developer,
device developer and network manager. These stakeholders
have to address issues that are attributed to the life-cycle
phases of an IoT application such design, implementation,
deployment and evolution. The lack of mechanisms to
address the concerns of the various stakeholders and the
special skill and expertise required by the stakeholders to
identify components and to understand the system
contributes to the challenges facing IoT application
development.
4.8. Quality Evaluation
Since IoT applications are currently being integrated
into the daily activities of our lives and sometimes used in
critical situations with little or no tolerance for errors and
failures. Therefore, it means that the overall system quality
is important and must be thoroughly evaluated to guarantee
that it is of high quality before being deployed. However,
evaluating quality attributes such as performance is a key
challenge since it depends on the performance of many
components as well as the performance of the underlying
technologies. The performance evaluation of the individual
underlying technologies have been reported in the various
literature [35][36][37], but the lack of a thorough
performance evaluation for IoT applications is still an open
issue. [30]
5. Review of Existing IoT Application Framework
IoT Application development is an active research
area. Several frameworks have been proposed and
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implemented recently. These frameworks are diverse in their
approach and scope. In this section, we present the most
interesting IoT application development frameworks:
(i) IDeA- IoT DevProcess and AppFramework
(ii)FRASAD-Framework for Sensor Application
Development
(iii)D-LITe-Distributed Logic for Internet of Things
sErvices
(iv) IoTLink- An Internet of Things Prototyping Toolkit
(v) IoT Application Framework powered by WebRTC
(vi) DataTweet Framework
(vii) IoTSuite
(viii) RapIoT
The selected frameworks have been recently
published and designed specifically for IoT applications.
Table I in the Appendix shows the comprehensive summary
of these frameworks. Details of the identified frameworks
are discussed below:
5.1. IDeA- IoT DevProcess and AppFramework
IDeA [4] adopts a model based systems engineering
methodology for IoT application development, focusing on
the design phase. It consists of a method called IoT
DevProcess and a supporting tool called IoT AppFramework.
IDeA provides high-level abstractions to address the
heterogeneity of hardware devices and software components
in the system model through a SysML profile named
SysML4IoT. SysML4IoT aids stakeholders to deal with the
system complexity increases the understanding and
communicates the system model in an unambiguous.
Furthermore, it promotes reusability and interoperability
amongst software components and systems. The profile is
strongly based on the IoT Domain Model of the reference
model introduced by a European research project, called
IoT-A [38].IDeA addresses the concerns of the various
stakeholders( Device Expert, Domain Specialist, IoT
requirements Engineer, IoT Application Engineer and IoT
Deployment Manager)using Views and ViewPoints. To
promote reusability of model elements, IDeA uses IoT
model libraries, a SysML package used for containing
model elements, such as devices or resources, which can be
reused by stakeholders when modelling IoT applications.
The IoT application Viewpoints, SysML4IoT, and the model
library makes up the IoT AppFramework.
The IoT DevProcess is an extension of the OOSEM(Object-
Oriented System Engineering Method), which basically
allocates activities to predefined stakeholders, provide
modifications and inclusion of existing activities and
artefacts.
IDeA was used in designing a smart building IoT
application system that makes offices more comfortable for
its employees and at the same time, reducing the energy
consumption in a building system, which consists of several
buildings, each one with one or more floors and each floor
with several rooms. One of the major limitations of this
framework is that it requires all the stakeholders to have a
deep understanding of the IoT-A domain model.
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5.2. FRASAD- Framework for Sensor Application
Development.
FRASAD [8] is a node-centric software architecture and a
rule-based programming model that allow designers to
describe IoT applications. It uses the multi-layered Model
Driven Architecture (MDA) for its architectural design. At
the highest abstraction level, a Domain Specific Language
(DSL) enabled by rule-based programming model uncouples
the programming language and the execution model used by
the underlying operating system.
This architecture integrates the traditional
architecture of sensor nodes (Hardware Layer (HL),
Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) and Operating System
Layer (OSL)) with two new upper layers: the Operating
System Abstraction Layer (OAL) and Application Layer
(APL).
The goal of the APL and OAL layers is to offer a
higher level of abstraction and portability when hiding the
lower platform. At the APL, the Platform Independent
Model (PIM) of MDA, using a DSL designed at this layer,
captures the application’s logic and requirements through a
mapping process. The OAL translates generic applications
written using the DSL into the equivalent operating system-
specific implementation. Given the OS-specific platform
model, a transformation process is defined to translate the
PIM to a Platform Specific Model (PSM) in the OSL. The
OS-specific libraries and the hardware specific PSM in the
two lower layers, HL and HAL are used in the generation of
the binary codes that drives the sensor nodes.
FRASAD supports the interaction between an upper
layer and the next lower layer through a predefined interface.
Every layer is encapsulated into a component. IoT
applications is built on top of this architecture independent
of the underlying platform, and a translator/compiler over
the OS layer deals with the complexity of the translations
between both abstraction levels. In this way, FRASAD takes
an application model as input and transparently transforms it
into the equivalent final platform specific application.
FRASAD also provides a graphical user interface (GUI),
code generation components and supporting tools were
included to help developers to design, implement, optimise,
and test the IoT application. In evaluating FRASAD, there is
a need to extend the programming model and the framework
to more operating systems and various kinds of IoT
applications.
5.3. D-LITe- Distributed Logic for Internet of
Things sErvices
D-LITe[39] is a distributed framework for designing
IoT applications and deploying them over a set of
heterogeneous devices and platforms. It allows developers
to build and deploy IoT applications as a collaboration of
logical units between nodes.
D-LITe adopts the choreography approach in
combining services by autonomous nodes. With
choreography, the framework can allow each node to
independently react to changes in the context and assigns a
unit of the entire IoT application to each participating nodes,
using processing capabilities that are closest to the source of
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the request. This arrangement reduces the network
bandwidth, thus saving energy.
The principle of operation of D-LITe is inspired by
the Observer and the Strategy design pattern. With the
Observer design pattern, this framework allows nodes to
subscribe to other nodes that publish data. Adopting the
Strategy design pattern approach, D-LITe can dynamically
change a node’s operation. Each node contains a static piece
of code that provides access to the dynamic component of
the IoT application, which can be configured on the fly. A
rule analyser manages this dynamic component. The rule
analyser performs the execution of a set of rules that
represents a node’s expected behaviour. These set of rules
can be set and changed and dynamically in the network.
D-LITe provides a tool to program each node. It uses
Finite State Transducer (FST) to describe the IoT
application logic and a description language SALT (Simple
Application Logic description using Transducers) to
configure nodes. SALT and a messaging service allow the
D-LITe nodes to collaborate and interact with each other.
5.4. IoTLink- An Internet of Things Prototyping
Toolkit
IoTLink [40] is a development toolkit based on model-
driven development that allows stakeholders with limited
programming skills to create IoT application models using a
graphical domain-specific language. Using visual notations,
IoT developers can specify application components in a
platform-independent model, which then can be converted
into a platform-specific model.
The platform independent meta-model of IoTLink is
structured into four layers. The first layer is primarily
responsible for the abstraction of heterogeneous connection
to the various sensors. This layer also provides specific
communication technologies and a uniform interface for the
components in the other layers. The second layer determines
the specific state of physical objects by processing the data
of the sensors. This layer is important because it may be
necessary to combine several types of sensors to sense some
physical events. The third layer uses the object- oriented
paradigm to abstracts domain objects and their attributes
from the physical objects they represent. The fourth layer
exposes the identified domain objects to the application
logic and to the persistence storage.
IoTLink provides a visual editor that allows users to
define concrete IoT application prototypes. Developers can
select concrete components across the four layers, and
connect them together. The generated model can be
transformed into a Java source code, which can be further
developed by an experienced developer. IoTLink toolkit
supports rapid prototyping development and allows
developers to easily develop IoT application model visually
and automatically generate a Java source codes based on the
model. However, it does not allow developers to check for
the integrity and completeness of the application model
before the generation of the Java source codes.
5.5. IoT Application Framework powered by
WebRTC
This framework [41] is a web-based application framework
and network architecture for rapidly developing distributed
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IoT applications. The framework provides a web-based user
interface with interactive virtual IO ports and a runtime
environment for IoT device emulation. The network
architecture provides supports for the local computation and
direct device-to-device connection.
A network of IoT devices that adopts this network
architecture uses WebRTC data channels to enable direct
device-to-device communication for devices that supports
the WebRTC stack and the data channel API. For devices
that do not supports the WebRTC stack and the data channel
API, the device-to-device connection is relayed using an
HTTP-RTCWeb proxy. The proxy server enables direct
device-to-device communication between devices that
support WebRTC peer signalling and devices that do not. It
is typically deployed on a gateway node to devices that do
not support WebRTC peer signalling. All devices that
participate in direct device-to-device connections maintain a
persistent signalling channel to a device registrar server. The
registrar server facilitates device discovery and exchange of
signalling messages. It maintains a device directory database
that maps unique device IDs to Web Socket signalling
connections. The signalling channel is only used for device
discovery and WebRTC signalling.
The main component of this framework is implemented in
form of a web application, which provides all the features
necessary to model the non-trivial IoT devices in a browser.
The application consists of two main components: User
Interface (UI) and Device Runtime Environment. For
performance and security reasons, the two components are
designed to run in separate JavaScript contexts. The UI
provides a means to display a collection of widgets arranged
into virtual control panels and allows users to interact with
the application. The device runtime environment simulates
an IoT device. The environment manages a collection of
virtual ports, which emulates IO ports found on physical
hardware devices.
This framework enforces developers to build IoT application
logic in JavaScript resulting into codes that are not easily
portable to real embedded devices.
5.6. DataTweet Framework
DataTweet [42] is an IoT application development
framework that provides a mechanism for decoupling an IoT
application logic from common IoT functionalities such as
discovery, configuration and service management and
registration. This framework provides an open source API
for the common functionalities, which allows developers to
concentrate more on the end-user centric aspect of the IoT
application. The API significantly reduces the amount of
written code and ultimately the time to complete the
application.
The framework mainly consists of two components: (i)
Application Logic (AL) (ii) Common Service Entity (CSE).
The AL supports all the activities involved in designing the
user-interface of the application. It provides an interface
through which end-users can interact with the IoT
application. This interface contains features such as such as
semantic search (basic and advanced), updating
configuration and sending commands to actuators. The AL
functionalities are primarily implemented by RESTful web
services.
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The CSE is responsible for the identification and
combination of several common functionalities required in
the development of an IoT application. These functionalities
include security mechanisms by design to protect the
privacy of the end users, collection proxies to manage the
large range of communication protocols, and configuration
management. The CSE interacts with the hardware devices
and provides a standard APIs to developers.
To promote cross-domain/use cases IoT application
scenarios, this framework can allow the CSE of a particular
domain to be connected to embedded devices belonging to a
different domain of operations. Furthermore, The AL
belonging to one application can be made to communicate
with the CSE of another application, thus enabling
horizontal IoT use cases. However, in industrial applications,
this feature may be difficult to achieve.
5.7. DataTweet Framework
IoTSuite [43] is a toolkit for the rapid development
of IoT applications. It provides a set of tools that reduces the
development effort at various phases of an IoT application
development process by providing automation. It supports
the automation of tasks at the different phases of IoT
application development. Developing an IoT application
using the IoTSuite framework involves the following steps
in developing IoT applications:(i)domain vocabulary
specification, (ii) vocabulary specification compilation,(iii)
application architecture specification, (iv) architecture
specification compilation, (v) application logic
implementation, (vi) target deployments specification, (vii)
generation of a map from a set computational services to a
corresponding set of devices, (vii) device drivers
implementation, (viii) linking and evolution.
IoTSuite basically comprises of the following
components to help stakeholders develop IoT applications
rapidly: (i) An editor that allows stakeholders with limited
programming experience to write high-level textual
specifications.(ii) A compiler that parses high-level
specifications and translates them into code that can be used
by other components in the system.(iii) A mapper module
that generates a mapping from computational services to
devices.(iv) A linker module that integrates code generated
by the various phases of compilation into a set of platform-
specific packages for devices, specified in the deployment
specification.(v) A runtime system, which leverages existing
middleware platforms and responsible for the distributed
execution of an IoT application.
IoTSuite simplifies the process of developing IoT
application by providing automation at various stages of the
application lifecycle. However, there is a need to integrate a
mechanism for testing the design and implementation of IoT
application developed using this framework for faults and
errors.
5.8. RapIot Framework
RapIoT [44] is a set of integrated tools that facilitates the
rapid prototyping of IoT application by non-experts. It aims
at providing support to the development of collaborative
applications by defining a set of data primitives. RapIot
primitives (information sensed by sensors and actions
performed by actuators and displays) simplifies the
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development of IoT systems that uses a network of devices
that is distributed across several users and environments by
providing a low coupling interface between the IoT device
and the application logic. This allows an IoT device to
accommodate different applications without reprogramming
it.
The development toolkit of RapIoT consists of the following
components: (i) RapEmbedded: an Arduino library that
defines and implements RapIoT primitives on IoT devices;
(ii) RapMobile: a multi-platform mobile app that primarily
serves as the gateway layer between the hardware devices
and the RapIoT cloud service. It also supports the discovery
and configuration of IoT devices. (iii) RapCloud: It consists
of the cloud service, a JavaScript library and the Rapcloud
API. This component enables the development of IoT
applications that communicate with the hardware devices.
Basically, the RapEmbedded library on the Arduino board
implements the specific RapIoT primitives for each IoT
device. Instances of these primitives are broadcasted using
the RapMobile and made available through a simple API
provided by RapCloud.
The steps for developing IoT application using this toolkit
includes:(i) Device development(ii) Application
development (iii) Application deployment (iv) Device
appropriation (v)Application appropriation. RapIoT
approach of developing IoT applications facilitates the
collaborative applications. However, it cannot be used for
IoT applications whose behaviour cannot be captured using
simple RapIoT primitives.
6. Conclusion and Future Research Directions
IoT applications are increasingly being deployed in
several domains such as health, transportation and
agriculture. Unlike conventional software applications, IoT
applications depends on a heterogeneous mix of
technologies and components. Moreover, IoT stakeholders
require expertise in the underlying technologies and would
need to clearly understand the domain knowledge. These
factors make the development of IoT application complex,
time-consuming and challenging. Hence, the need for an IoT
framework.
This paper introduces the IoT technology stack and
describes the important requirements of IoT applications. It
then explores the challenges in developing IoT applications
and reviews the existing development frameworks that
manages the complexity of building IoT applications,
highlighting their strengths and weaknesses.
This survey shows that a number of development
frameworks have been developed to ease the process of
building IoT applications. These frameworks differ from
each other in many aspects and similar to each other in
several other aspects and most of them are still work in
progress. It is observed that majority of the frameworks
focuses on the speed of developing IoT applications,
ignoring the quality of the application during development.
There is a need to integrate quality control mechanisms in
these frameworks that can help in generating IoT application
with high quality. In addition, dynamic detection and
integration of heterogeneous devices/services and new
technologies need to be investigated and implemented in
these frameworks.
7
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Table 1: Summary of IoT Application Frameworks and Toolkits

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