Summary

The Internet of Things (IoT) market has expanded significantly over the past ten years, from the development of ultra-low-power hardware to cloud-based services. With the advent of 5G technology, a new era for edge computing on IoT devices will open up. In recent years, a wide variety of communication technologies have steadily developed, representing a variety of domains and communication specifications. The true realisation of the Internet of Things ecosystem is currently constrained by a number of dynamic integration challenges due to the heterogeneity of technology and interconnectivity. In this context, it is necessary to completely redesign, design, and standardise a number of emerging IoT domains from scratch in order to achieve seamless IoT ecosystem integration.

This paper examines the Internet of Nano-Things (IoNT), Internet of Space-Things (IoST), Internet of Underwater-Things (IoUT), and Social Internet of Things (SIoT), with a focus on their integration and capacity to source other IoT domains by highlighting their application domains, cutting-edge research, and open challenges. Our motivation for writing this article stems from the fact that, to the best of our knowledge, there is little to no information on the state of these ecosystems at the moment. The paper concludes by summarising the integration of these ecosystems with existing IoT domains and outlining potential future directions for resolving the issues.