Internet of Things (IoT) embodies a vision of merging heterogeneous objects to establish seamless interaction among physical and virtual entities. IoT has given the Internet a shift from connecting networks to interconnecting the physical world. The IoT devices are capable of sensing, processing, communicating and storing the data acquired from the physical world. Most of the applications of IoT are pervasive in nature, the pervasive IoT environment poses many challenges due to constrained resources in these miniature and unattended IoT devices. This paper presents a survey of physical and virtual resource management in IoT systems. The main focus of the paper is on resource management in pervasive IoT environment with limited resources. This paper also presents a use case of IoT based Body Area Network and proposes a model for resource management in personal and community healthcare.

Introduction

Internet of Things is one of the promising research paradigms in the current epoch, characterized by using smart and self-configuring objects such as sensors, actuators, RFIDs, etc that are connected to the Internet and exchange data by sensing, reacting to events and interacting with the environment. It embodies a vision of merging heterogeneous objects while utilizing the Internet as a backbone of communication to establish interaction among physical and virtual entities. These seamless interactions among heterogeneous objects make IoT a paradigm that enables ubiquitous and pervasive applications. Thus Internet has seen a pervasive shift from interconnecting end-user nodes to interconnecting physical objects creating a platform of smarter objects capable of informative communication and intelligent processing. Since a huge number of things connect to the Internet, therefore, it is necessary to have an adequate architecture that permits easy connectivity and control. Extensive work has been done in last few years to find a universal IoT architecture, but IoT encompasses an extremely wide range of applications, as such, single reference architecture has not been used for all concrete implementations Bandyopadhyay and Sen (2011). An IoT architecture should be capable of performing a minimum of three essential functions viz. sensing and aggregation of data, communicating data and utilizing data to provide services at the application level (see Figure 1). The sensing and data collection is done by physical IoT nodes that sense some physical parameters or identifies other nodes in smart environments. Data aggregation, data conversion, and data transmission are performed by network communication nodes such as gateways, responsible for connecting to other smart things, network nodes and servers. The communicated data is then utilized by IoT applications to deliver various services to the users. IoT comprises of complex environments encompassing many heterogeneous components. The huge amount of data generated by sensor-instrumented objects of the real world in an IoT environment will impose a great demand on processing and storage resources to transform the data into useful information or services. Some applications will be latency sensitive, while other applications will require complex processing including historical data and time series analysis. Therefore, considering the typical resource constraints of IoT devices, it is difficult to envision a real-world IoT ecosystem without including a cloud platform, or at least some powerful devices, for instance, smart gateways or edge/fog devices.