Elsevier

Computer Networks

Volume 54, Issue 15, 28 October 2010, Pages 2787-2805
Computer Networks

The Internet of Things: A survey

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comnet.2010.05.010Get rights and content

Abstract

This paper addresses the Internet of Things. Main enabling factor of this promising paradigm is the integration of several technologies and communications solutions. Identification and tracking technologies, wired and wireless sensor and actuator networks, enhanced communication protocols (shared with the Next Generation Internet), and distributed intelligence for smart objects are just the most relevant. As one can easily imagine, any serious contribution to the advance of the Internet of Things must necessarily be the result of synergetic activities conducted in different fields of knowledge, such as telecommunications, informatics, electronics and social science. In such a complex scenario, this survey is directed to those who want to approach this complex discipline and contribute to its development. Different visions of this Internet of Things paradigm are reported and enabling technologies reviewed. What emerges is that still major issues shall be faced by the research community. The most relevant among them are addressed in details.

Introduction

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a novel paradigm that is rapidly gaining ground in the scenario of modern wireless telecommunications. The basic idea of this concept is the pervasive presence around us of a variety of things or objects – such as Radio-Frequency IDentification (RFID) tags, sensors, actuators, mobile phones, etc. – which, through unique addressing schemes, are able to interact with each other and cooperate with their neighbors to reach common goals [1].

Unquestionably, the main strength of the IoT idea is the high impact it will have on several aspects of everyday-life and behavior of potential users. From the point of view of a private user, the most obvious effects of the IoT introduction will be visible in both working and domestic fields. In this context, domotics, assisted living, e-health, enhanced learning are only a few examples of possible application scenarios in which the new paradigm will play a leading role in the near future. Similarly, from the perspective of business users, the most apparent consequences will be equally visible in fields such as, automation and industrial manufacturing, logistics, business/process management, intelligent transportation of people and goods.

By starting from the considerations above, it should not be surprising that IoT is included by the US National Intelligence Council in the list of six “Disruptive Civil Technologies” with potential impacts on US national power [2]. NIC foresees that “by 2025 Internet nodes may reside in everyday things – food packages, furniture, paper documents, and more”. It highlights future opportunities that will arise, starting from the idea that “popular demand combined with technology advances could drive widespread diffusion of an Internet of Things (IoT) that could, like the present Internet, contribute invaluably to economic development”. The possible threats deriving from a widespread adoption of such a technology are also stressed. Indeed, it is emphasized that “to the extent that everyday objects become information security risks, the IoT could distribute those risks far more widely than the Internet has to date”.

Actually, many challenging issues still need to be addressed and both technological as well as social knots have to be untied before the IoT idea being widely accepted. Central issues are making a full interoperability of interconnected devices possible, providing them with an always higher degree of smartness by enabling their adaptation and autonomous behavior, while guaranteeing trust, privacy, and security. Also, the IoT idea poses several new problems concerning the networking aspects. In fact, the things composing the IoT will be characterized by low resources in terms of both computation and energy capacity. Accordingly, the proposed solutions need to pay special attention to resource efficiency besides the obvious scalability problems.

Several industrial, standardization and research bodies are currently involved in the activity of development of solutions to fulfill the highlighted technological requirements. This survey gives a picture of the current state of the art on the IoT. More specifically, it:

  • provides the readers with a description of the different visions of the Internet of Things paradigm coming from different scientific communities;

  • reviews the enabling technologies and illustrates which are the major benefits of spread of this paradigm in everyday-life;

  • offers an analysis of the major research issues the scientific community still has to face.

The main objective is to give the reader the opportunity of understanding what has been done (protocols, algorithms, proposed solutions) and what still remains to be addressed, as well as which are the enabling factors of this evolutionary process and what are its weaknesses and risk factors.

The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, we introduce and compare the different visions of the IoT paradigm, which are available from the literature. The IoT main enabling technologies are the subject of Section 3, while the description of the principal applications, which in the future will benefit from the full deployment of the IoT idea, are addressed in Section 4. Section 5 gives a glance at the open issues on which research should focus more, by stressing topics such as addressing, networking, security, privacy, and standardization efforts. Conclusions and future research hints are given in Section 6.

Section snippets

One paradigm, many visions

Manifold definitions of Internet of Things traceable within the research community testify to the strong interest in the IoT issue and to the vivacity of the debates on it. By browsing the literature, an interested reader might experience a real difficulty in understanding what IoT really means, which basic ideas stand behind this concept, and which social, economical and technical implications the full deployment of IoT will have.

The reason of today apparent fuzziness around this term is a

Enabling technologies

Actualization of the IoT concept into the real world is possible through the integration of several enabling technologies. In this section we discuss the most relevant ones. Note that it is not our purpose to provide a comprehensive survey of each technology. Our major aim is to provide a picture of the role they will likely play in the IoT. Interested readers will find references to technical publications for each specific technology.

Applications

Potentialities offered by the IoT make possible the development of a huge number of applications, of which only a very small part is currently available to our society. Many are the domains and the environments in which new applications would likely improve the quality of our lives: at home, while travelling, when sick, at work, when jogging and at the gym, just to cite a few. These environments are now equipped with objects with only primitive intelligence, most of times without any

Open issues

Although the enabling technologies described in Section 3 make the IoT concept feasible, a large research effort is still required. In this section, we firstly review the standardization activities that are being carried out on different IoT-related technologies (Section 5.1). Secondly, we show the most important research issues that need to be addressed to meet the requirements characterizing IoT scenarios. More specifically, in Section 5.2 we focus on addressing and networking issues, whereas

Conclusions

The Internet has changed drastically the way we live, moving interactions between people at a virtual level in several contexts spanning from the professional life to social relationships. The IoT has the potential to add a new dimension to this process by enabling communications with and among smart objects, thus leading to the vision of “anytime, anywhere, anymedia, anything” communications.

To this purpose, we observe that the IoT should be considered as part of the overall Internet of the

Luigi Atzori is assistant professor at the University of Cagliari (Italy) since 2000. His main research topics of interest are in multimedia networking: error recovery and concealment, IP Telephony, video streaming, network QoS management. He has published more than 80 journal articles and refereed conference papers. He has been awarded a Fulbright Scholarship (11/2003–05/2004) to work on video at the University of Arizona. He is editor for the ACM/Springer Wireless Networks Journal and is

References (96)

  • I.F. Akyildiz et al.

    Wireless sensor networks: a survey

    Computer Networks

    (2002)
  • National Intelligence Council, Disruptive Civil Technologies – Six Technologies with Potential Impacts on US Interests...
  • INFSO D.4 Networked Enterprise & RFID INFSO G.2 Micro & Nanosystems, in: Co-operation with the Working Group RFID of...
  • Auto-Id Labs,...
  • The EPCglobal Architecture Framework, EPCglobal Final Version 1.3, Approved 19 March 2009,...
  • K. Sakamura, Challenges in the age of ubiquitous computing: a case study of T-engine – an open development platform for...
  • M. Presser, A. Gluhak, The Internet of Things: Connecting the Real World with the Digital World, EURESCOM mess@ge – The...
  • M. Botterman, for the European Commission Information Society and Media Directorate General, Networked Enterprise &...
  • B. Sterling

    Shaping Things – Mediawork Pamphlets

    (2005)
  • ITU Internet Reports, The Internet of Things, November...
  • A. Dunkels, J.P. Vasseur, IP for Smart Objects, Internet Protocol for Smart Objects (IPSO) Alliance, White Paper #1,...
  • J. Hui, D. Culler, S. Chakrabarti, 6LoWPAN: Incorporating IEEE 802.15.4 Into the IP Architecture – Internet Protocol...
  • N. Gershenfeld et al.

    The internet of things

    Scientific American

    (2004)
  • I. Toma, E. Simperl, Graham Hench, A joint roadmap for semantic technologies and the internet of things, in:...
  • A. Katasonov, O. Kaykova, O. Khriyenko, S. Nikitin, V. Terziyan, Smart semantic middleware for the internet of things,...
  • W. Wahlster, Web 3.0: Semantic Technologies for the Internet of Services and of Things, Lecture at the 2008 Dresden...
  • I. Vázquez, Social Devices: Semantic Technology for the Internet of Things, Week@ESI, Zamudio, Spain, June...
  • D. Guinard, T. Vlad, Towards the web of things: web mashups for embedded devices, in: Proceedings of the International...
  • L. Srivastava, Pervasive, ambient, ubiquitous: the magic of radio, in: European Commission Conference “From RFID to the...
  • K. Finkenzeller

    RFID Handbook

    (2003)
  • A. Jules

    RFID security and privacy: a research survey

    IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications

    (2006)
  • ...
  • G. Marrocco, C. Occhiuzzi, F. Amato, Sensor-oriented passive RFID, in: Proceedings of TIWDC 2009, Pula, Italy,...
  • ...
  • M. Buettner, B. Greenstein, A. Sample, J.R. Smith, D. Wetherall, Revisiting smart dust with RFID sensor networks, in:...
  • S. De Deugd et al.

    SODA: service oriented device architecture

    IEEE Pervasive Computing

    (2006)
  • J. Pasley

    How BPEL and SOA are changing web services development

    IEEE Internet Computing

    (2005)
  • P. Spiess, S. Karnouskos, D. Guinard, D. Savio, O. Baecker, L. Souza, V. Trifa, SOA-based integration of the internet...
  • C. Buckl, S. Sommer, A. Scholz, A. Knoll, A. Kemper, J. Heuer, A. Schmitt, Services to the field: an approach for...
  • OASIS, Web Services Business Process Execution Language Version 2.0, Working Draft,...
  • Hydra Middleware Project, FP6 European Project,...
  • S. Duquennoy, G. Grimaud, J.-J. Vandewalle, The web of things: interconnecting devices with high usability and...
  • ...
  • C. Floerkemeier et al.

    RFID application development with the Accada middleware platform

    IEEE System Journal

    (2007)
  • E. Welbourne et al.

    Building the internet of things using RFID: the RFID ecosystem experience

    IEEE Internet Computing

    (2009)
  • ...
  • ...
  • R. Yuan et al.

    Value Chain Oriented RFID System Framework and Enterprise Application

    (2007)
  • METRO Group Future Store Initiative,...
  • S. Karpischek, F. Michahelles, F. Resatsch, E. Fleisch, Mobile sales assistant – an NFC-based product information...
  • G. Broll et al.

    PERCI: pervasive service interaction with the internet of things

    IEEE Internet Computing

    (2009)
  • A. Ilic et al.

    Using sensor information to reduce the carbon footprint of perishable goods

    IEEE Pervasive Computing

    (2009)
  • A. Dada, F. Thiesse, Sensor applications in the supply chain: the example of quality-based issuing of perishables, in:...
  • D. Reilly, M. Welsman-Dinelle, C. Bate, K. Inkpen, Just point and click? Using handhelds to interact with paper maps,...
  • R. Hardy, E. Rukzio, Touch & interact: touch-based interaction of mobile phones with displays, in: Proceedings of ACM...
  • A.M. Vilamovska, E. Hattziandreu, R. Schindler, C. Van Oranje, H. De Vries, J. Krapelse, RFID Application in Healthcare...
  • D. Niyato et al.

    Remote patient monitoring service using heterogeneous wireless access networks: architecture and optimization

    IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications

    (2009)
  • Cited by (11628)

    View all citing articles on Scopus

    Luigi Atzori is assistant professor at the University of Cagliari (Italy) since 2000. His main research topics of interest are in multimedia networking: error recovery and concealment, IP Telephony, video streaming, network QoS management. He has published more than 80 journal articles and refereed conference papers. He has been awarded a Fulbright Scholarship (11/2003–05/2004) to work on video at the University of Arizona. He is editor for the ACM/Springer Wireless Networks Journal and is involved in the organization of several International Conferences on Multimedia Networking.

    Antonio Iera is a Full Professor of Telecommunications at the University “Mediterranea” of Reggio Calabria, Italy. He graduated in Computer Engineering at the University of Calabria in 1991; then he received a Master Diploma in Information Technology from CEFRIEL/Politecnico di Milano and a Ph.D. degree from the University of Calabria. From 1994 to 1995 he has been with Siemens AG in Munich, Germany to participate to the RACE II ATDMA (Advanced TDMA Mobile Access) project under a CEC Fellowship Contract. Since 1997 he has been with the University Mediterranea, Reggio Calabria, where he currently holds the positions of scientific coordinator of the local Research Units of the National Group of Telecommunications and Information Theory (GTTI) and of the National Inter-University Consortium for Telecommunications (CNIT), Director of the ARTS – Laboratory for Advanced Research into Telecommunication Systems, and Head of the Department DIMET. His research interests include: new generation mobile and wireless systems, broadband satellite systems, Internet of Things. Elevated to the IEEE Senior Member status in 2007.

    Giacomo Morabito was born in Messina, Sicily (Italy) on March 16, 1972. He received the laurea degree in Electrical Engineering and the Ph.D. in Electrical, Computer and Telecommunications Engineering from the Istituto di Informatica e Telecomunicazioni, University of Catania, Catania (Italy), in 1996 and 2000, respectively. From November 1999 to April 2001, he was with the Broadband and Wireless Networking Laboratory of the Georgia Institute of Technology as a Research Engineer. Since April 2001 he is with the Dipartimento di Ingegneria Informatica e delleTelecomunicazioni of the University of Catania where he is currently Associate Professor. His research interests focus on analysis and solutions for wireless networks.

    View full text