Automatic contract negotiation, service discovery and mutual authentication solutions: A survey on the enabling technologies of the forthcoming IoT ecosystems

Abstract The Internet-of-Things (IoT) paradigm envisions the full integration of several technologies in order to enable a new class of applications relying on an unprecedented sensing and actuating infrastructure. However, traditional IoT applications are static, closed, vertically integrated solutions which do not allow to fully exploit the potentialities of this new technological platform. For this reason IoT systems are now evolving towards more open and dynamic architectures and solutions in which dynamicity is considered an added value to build context-aware and self-adapting applications. In this new continuous changing scenario, solutions for automatic contract negotiation and management, service discovery and mutual authentication will play a central role, since they can be considered the main building blocks to create secure and dynamic applications. The paper surveys research activities in the these fields, pointing out the challenges and the open research issues that arise in such a new emerging scenario.