Research trends in existing technologies that are building blocks to the internet of things

The internet of things (IoT) is based on interfacing the digital and physical worlds and making the information generated as a result available via the internet. The challenge that IoT faces as a new research area, is in the identification of further research areas and the way forward. Therefore this paper is the culmination of a research to identify further research areas in the IoT and the relevance of IoT to South Africa. The research first conducted a review of 28 IoT European Union (EU) Framework projects available over the internet. From the reviews, the research extracted the technologies that the EU is conducting research on as building blocks to the IoT. Using an adaptation of the Graham Vickery and Sacha Wunsch-Vincent framework which analyses developments in ICT research and development, this research interviewed experts working with the identified technologies and came up with research trends in the various technologies that are building blocks to the IoT and its relevance to South Africa. Keywords—internet of things, sensors, embedded systems, wireless broadband networks, cloud computing, mobile technologies, interoperability