IoT-A Architecture Reference Model. The main aim of the IoT-A project is to propose an IoT architecture reference model (ARM). The intended usage of the ARM is the following: • To serve as a cognitive aid – guiding discussions since it provides a common language to everyone involved and helping in identifying independent building blocks of an IoT system; • Common grounding – definition of IoT entities and describing their basic interactions and relationships with each other, i.e. the ARM provides common concepts that should be used to build compliant IoT systems; • Generation of architecture – IoT ARM can be used for the generation of compliant architectures for specific systems using provided best practices, facilitating creation of interoperable IoT systems; • Benchmarking – standardized description, ordering and delineation of components provide a high level of transparency and inherent comparability to the benchmarking process. The relationship between reference architecture, architectures and the actual systems is outlined in Figure 1. Reference models and reference architectures provide a description of greater abstraction than what is inherent to actual systems and applications. They are more abstract than system architectures that have been designed for a particular application with particular constraints and choices. Guidance in the form of best practices can be associated to reference architecture in order to derive use-case-specific architectures from the reference architecture.
