LAUSR

Internet of Things (IoT) refers to the interconnection of physical objects via the Internet. It utilizes complex back-end systems that need different capabilities depending on the requirements of the system. IoT has already been used in various applications, such as agriculture, smart home, health, automobiles, and smart grids. There are many IoT platforms, each of them capable of providing specific services for such applications. Finding the best match between application and platform is, however, a hard task as it is difficult to understand the implications of small differences between platforms. This article builds on previous work that has identified 21 important factors of an IoT platform, which were verified by the Delphi method. We demonstrate here how these factors can be used to discriminate between five well-known IoT platforms, which are arbitrarily chosen based on their market share. These results illustrate how the proposed approach provides an objective methodology that can be used to select the most suitable IoT platform for different business applications based on their particular requirements.