Things-to-Cloud (T2C): A Protocol-Based Nine-Layered Architecture N. D. Patel, B. M. Mehtre, and Rajeev Wankar Abstract The Internet of Things (IoT) is rapidly becoming a part of our regular activ- ities and environment. According to Cisco, by 2030, it is expected that 500 billion devices will be connected to the IoT. Every passing day, new devices and sensors coming in the market, which use different protocols to connect to the network. With this expected growth of the Internet of Things and the emergence of Fog and Cloud Computing, there is a need for a standard protocol suite to handle different aspects of standardization and cloud protocols in the IoT environment that is not covered by currently existing Three, four, and five-layered IoT models. A T2C architecture is proposed that provides the most prominent standard protocols into nine layers and shows why this extension is essential. The proposed T2C architecture fulfills the prescribed activities for smart sensors and fog networking in the backbone, which brings significant benefits, scalability, and low-power consumption in the IoT archi- tecture. It emphasizes on how IoT device classification can be mapped to our proposed nine-layered T2C Architecture. Keywords Internet of Things · IoT protocols · IoT layers · Things-to-Cloud (T2C) N. D. Patel (B ) · B. M. Mehtre Centre of Excellence in Cyber Security, Institute for Development & Research in Banking Technology (IDRBT), Hyderabad, India e-mail: ndpatel@idrbt.ac.in B. M. Mehtre e-mail: bmmehtre@idrbt.ac.in N. D. Patel · R. Wankar School of Computer & Information Sciences (SCIS), University of Hyderabad (UoH), Hyderabad, India e-mail: wankarcs@uohyd.ac.in © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 G. Ranganathan et al. (eds.), Inventive Communication and Computational Technologies, Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems 145, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7345-3_68 789