Introduction: Advances in IoT research and applications

Excerpt

The future of the Internet will consist of heterogeneously connected devices that will further extend the borders of the world with physical entities and virtual components. The Internet of Things (IoT) is a term that has been introduced in recent years to describe objects equipped with digital functionality that are able to communicate via the Internet (Li 2013; Reaidy et al. 2015), and it is considered as a part of the Internet of the future. Kevin Ashton firstly proposed the concept of IoT in 1999, and he referred the IoT as uniquely identifiable interoperable connected objects with radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology. IoT can comprise billions of intelligent communicating ‘things’, allowing people and things to be connected anytime, anyplace, with anything and anyone, ideally using any path/network and any service (Perera et al. 2015); as such, IoT will empower the connected things with new capabilities (Li et al. 2015a). In recent years, IoT has drawn significant research attention, evidenced by the number of survey papers written on the IoT subject published (Li et al. 2015a; Perera et al. 2015; Whitmore et al. 2015; Xu et al. 2014). …