The Internet of Things: Connecting Objects

Preface

Services designed over the Internet evolved depending on the needs identified from person-to-person interaction, such as email or phone services to meet other interactions, such as person-to-machine, machine-to-person and, lately, machine-to-machine where no human interaction is needed; thus building ubiquitous and pervasive computing. Such a computing system started a long time ago with the ambition of offering all-pervading computing to automate tasks and build a smart world. Introducing radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology in building new services over the network has pushed what is called the “Internet of Things” (IoT) as a meeting point between the real world and the virtual world, especially when combined with other technologies, such as sensor technology or mobile communication.

IoT appears to be one step further on the path to ubiquitous computing. This is possible with the introduction of RFID or sensor technologies, but also other technologies such as robotics, nanotechnology and others. These technologies make the Internet of things services an interdisciplinary field where most of the human senses are somehow reproduced and replaced in the virtual world.

So, what is meant by the Internet of things? From the economical point of view, it is about designing new services and generating new revenue streams in the communication value chain. This is not straightforward however, as lots of technical issues have been raised that need to be solved before an ...