Ensuring Quality of Service in the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things is expected to radically reshape many processes in a broad range of domains, from personal to industrial. In many of these heterogeneous scenarios, IoT systems will need to guarantee required levels of reliability and latency in order to provide high-quality services to end-users. Quality of Service support in IoT system will demand for explicit support at different levels. At the network level, on one hand, specific technical communication standards will be necessary to ensure timed and reliable data delivery. At the application level, instead, dedicated support from application protocols and design of novel resource allocation algorithms will be mandatory to cope with concurrent access and imple- ment proper management of resources. In this chapter, an overview of the current solutions for ensuring QoS in IoT systems is provided. Specifically, we first survey the current approaches at the network level through a summary of all the mechanisms included in the main communication standards for IoT. We then deliver an analysis of the current solutions available in IoT protocols and platforms to enforce QoS at the application level.