A systematic review of IoT communication strategies for an efficient smart environment

The massive increase in actuators, industrial devices, health care devices, and sensors, has led to the implementation of the Internet of Things (IoT), fast and flexible information technology communication between the devices. As such, responding to the needs in speedily way, and matching the smart services with modified requirements, IoT communications have facilitated the interconnections of things between applications, users, and smart devices in order to gain extra advantage of the numerous services of the Internet. In this paper, the authors first provided a comprehensive analysis on the IoT communication strategies and applications for smart devices based on a systematic literature review. Then, the communication strategies and applications are categorized into four main topics including device-to-device, device-to-cloud, device-to-gateway, and device-to-application scenarios. Furthermore, a technical taxonomy is presented to classify the existing papers according to search-based methodology in the scientific databases. The technical taxonomy presents five categories for IoT communication applications including monitoring-based communications, routing-based communications, health-based communications, intrusion-based communications, and resource-based communications. The evaluation factors and infrastructure attributes are discussed based on some technical questions. Finally, some new challenges and forthcoming issues of future IoT communications are presented.