CURRENT TRENDS IN INTERNET OF THINGS (IOT) AND SMART TECHNOLOGIES: A COMPREHENSIVE REVIEW

The rapid evolution of the Internet of Things (IoT) has transformed traditional systems into intelligent, interconnected smart environments. IoT, combined with emerging smart technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), edge computing, big data analytics, and cloud platforms, has enabled innovative applications across healthcare, smart cities, industrial automation, agriculture, and transportation. This review paper presents a comprehensive overview of current trends in IoT and smart technologies, highlighting recent advancements in architectures, communication protocols, data analytics, and security mechanisms. Furthermore, it discusses key challenges including scalability, interoperability, privacy, and energy efficiency, and outlines future research directions for sustainable and intelligent IoT ecosystems. The objective of this work is to provide researchers and practitioners with a consolidated reference to understand the state of the art and identify open research problems in the rapidly evolving IoT domain.