1. Introduction

The emergent paradigm of Internet of Things (IoT) promises to take the integration of people with communications and sensing technologies to a new level. With the possibility of addressing each physical object individually and make it part of a global network, the IoT has the potential to provide novel value-added services to make life easier and healthier for citizens, to increase the productivity of companies and to promote building more intelligent and sustainable cities, environments and countries. Despite its potential benefits, there are still many challenges to be overcome to leverage the wide dissemination and adoption of the IoT paradigm. One major challenge in this context is efficiently managing the resources involved in an IoT ecosystem. From the acquisition of physical data to its transformation into valuable services or information, there are several steps that must be performed, involving the various players in the complex IoT ecosystem. Such transformation consists of a process that demands resources from the system. IoT devices, such as sensors, have limited computing and energy resources, and they are not able to perform sophisticated processing and storing large amounts of data. Therefore, it is often necessary to rely on more powerful devices to fully perform the transformation process required by IoT applications. Such devices can vary from smartphones to gateway nodes to geographically distributed data centres of different scales. Considering the relevance of this subject and its complexity, the purpose of this book is to discuss the issues regarding resource management in IoT from a holistic perspective. Our goal is investigating the core activities encompassed in a holistic resource management process for IoT, with emphasis on resource allocation. We will not focus on the algorithmic solutions for resource allocation, but instead, on the different functionalities and architectural approaches involved on a basic workflow for managing the lifecycle of resources in an IoT system.