A Novel IoT Architecture for Seamless IoT Integration into University Systems

Abstract

IoT architectures play critical roles in guiding IoT system construction and enhancing IoT integration. However, there is still no standardized IoT architecture that meets the varying requirements of different IoT deployments. Although this has been a focus within the research community, no specific attention has been paid to optimizing an IoT architecture toward seamless IoT integration in educational environments. Moreover, different advanced system aspects have not been considered for designing an optimized IoT architecture. These include the need for complete security and privacy support, a highly responsive system, dynamic interactivity, and wide-range IoT connectivity. Such considerations are important considering the complexity and multidimensionality of integrating IoT in educational environments. In this paper, we introduced a novel IoT architecture with the main objective of facilitating the effective integration of IoT into university systems. It also aims at optimizing the IoT-integrated system with advanced aspects to enhance system security, responsiveness, and IoT connectivity. The proposed architecture provides a modular and scalable design of six architectural layers in addition to a vertical layer that provides security support across the architecture. Only the most relevant and critical layers are added to the architecture to maintain a practical trade-off between effective modularity and less complexity. Compared with other IoT architectures, the proposed one ensures high reliability, data management, full security support, responsiveness, and wide coverage while maintaining acceptable complexity.