Evaluation of IoT Device Management Tools

Industry 4.0 with IoT (Internet of Things) is the next wave in technology revolution which is expected to change our everyday life. This digitalization is having great impact on all the domains (energy, healthcare, transportation, manufacturing etc.) in addition to the ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) sector. In IoT scenarios, numerous sensors measure and report several phenomena and diversified IoT solutions are deployed to collect huge amount of data. IoT platforms, such as Amazon AWS, IBM Watson or Microsoft IoT Suite, have been available to aid the development of such services/applications. However, one of the major challenges faced by IoT solutions providers is the supervision and management of the large number of deployed sensors/devices. Presumably, the magnitude and heterogeneity of the IoT systems makes it difficult to manage them with conventional IT management tools and techniques. New techniques and tools have to be explored and developed or the traditional management solutions have to be adapted to the new challenges. In this paper, we identify and formulate the essential challenges of IoT device management and supervision, review the actual state-of-the-art IoT device management and supervision techniques and tools available on the market, and briefly evaluate their features and typical use cases.