Interaction between users and IoT clusters: Moving towards an Internet of People, Things and Services (IoPTS)

The Internet of Things (IoT) is paving the way for a vast number of objects in our environment to react, respond and work autonomously as and when required and as per their capability, role and position. They will be able to announce and offer their services to the users, and together this will enable the vision of an "Internet of People, Things and Services" (IoPTS). Application areas for IoT include smart cities, smart homes, environmental control, security & emergency, retail, logistics, industrial control, smart farming, and e-Health. All the IoT objects are organized in clusters, which have a logical relationship with each other and are part of an overall IoT architecture. Defining the cluster and the seamless user-cluster communication are the challenges of the IoPTS. In this work, we present the detailed scenarios and discuss the requirements and functionalities for the cluster framework that is needed to realize IoPTS. In particular, we focus on the interaction between the users and the IoT clusters, where the user profile (role, privileges, and preferences) should be matched with the services offered by the IoT cluster, including the initial set-up, access control, authentication, and authorization.