The Internet of Things domain will encompass an extremely wide range of technologies, from stateless to stateful, from extremely constrained to unconstrained, from hard real time to soft real time. Therefore, single reference architecture cannot be used as a blueprint for all possible concrete implementations. While a reference model can probably be identified, it is likely that several reference architectures will co-exist in the Internet of Things.
Architecture in this context is defined as a framework for the specification of a network's physical components and their functional organization and configuration, its operational principles and procedures, as well as data formats used in its operation.