Conceptualization of IoT architectures

<p>Although there is a large interest about internet of things (IoT) architectures, still there is no consensus on their conceptualization in the extant literature. This lack of information in conceptualization is problematic because it hampers the deep understanding of the appeared proposals, as well as the adoption of a shared workflow by the involved architects of these systems. Thus, a concise and agreed-upon conceptualization of IoT architectures is called for. This paper aims at giving a contribution on the topic. We start by reviewing the available standards, then, in light of their suggestions, a workflow to be followed in the definition of the architecture descriptions (ADs) of IoT systems is detailed and, in addition, a sample case study, which implements that workflow, is proposed. The contributions are sufficiently abstract to be applicable also to the description of the architecture of artificial intelligence of things (AIoT) systems.</p>