Internet of Things for smart living

Excerpt

Human beings are always in the pursuit of making their lives as smart (and easy) as possible. The term ‘smart’ means the involvement of some sort of intelligence in a system or entity. We cannot say that the people who came before us were not living smart. For instance, in the old ages, for distant communication, people used to use letters, pigeons, arrows, etc. That was then the most modern and smartest way of doing that. When the wired telephone came, that was the smartest way of communication in that era. When the wireless technologies came and later, Internet became a real impactful medium of doing the same types of tasks, we called that the smartest way of communication. Similarly, in many aspects of our life, we seek smartness, willingly or unwillingly, just to find some ease in doing the tasks that we must do. Though smartness has always been a part of human lifestyle, in today’s era, in the scientific and technological field, the word has specific connotation. One of the most recent smart concepts is the Internet of Things (IoT), which is supposed to make many things in our life easy (or, a better term, ‘easier’). While many types of theoretical research works are being carried out on different aspects of it, some researchers also amaze the people with their small-scale implementations of the futuristic ideas. There are indeed various barriers to materializing the vision to a reality as such type of interaction and communication among a wide variety of things or objects (as expected, mainly wirelessly) may also incur various kinds of security and privacy loopholes, Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE) issues, reliability issues, human and machine interaction issues, etc. The objective of this Special Issue (SI) is to capture and cover the significant latest advancements in all these areas circulating around or based on IoT. …