On the Classification of cyberphysical Smart Objects in the Internet of Things

The vision of the Internet of Things (IoT) based on Smart Objects (SOs) promotes an high-level architectural organization of the future IoT designed around the basic concept of SO. An SO is an autonomous, cyberphysical object augmented with sensing/actuation, processing, storing, and networking capabilities. An important issue in supporting future SO-based IoT systems is how to classify SOs. Classification of SOs is an important activity directly inuencing the definition of effective SO discovery services and management systems. In particular, the discovery service is a fundamental middleware component of the IoT as it allows SOs and their users to dynamically discover distributed SOs and, specifically, the services, operations, and data that they provide. This paper aims at proposing a reference taxonomy for SOs that is highly functional for an SO discovery service, and, more generally, for an SO management system. The taxonomy is based on a metadata model that is able to describe all the cyberphysical characteristics (geophysical, functional, and non-functional) of an SO