1.

INTRODUCTION

During the past few years, in the area of wireless communications and
networking, a novel paradigm named the Internet of Things (IoT) which was first
introduced by Kevin Ashton in the year 1998, has gained increasingly more
attention in the academia and industry [1]. By embedding short-range mobile
transceivers into a wide array of additional gadgets and everyday items, enabling
new forms of communication between people and things, and between things
themselves, IoT would add a new dimension to the world of information and
communication.

Unquestionably, the main strength of the IoT vision is the high impact it will
have on several aspects of every-day life and behaviour of potential users. From
the point of view of a private user, the most obvious effects of the IoT will be
visible in both working and domestic fields. In this context, assisted living, smart
homes and offices, e-health, enhanced learning is only a few examples of
possible application scenarios in which the new paradigm will play a leading role
in the near future [2]. 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.

However, many challenging issues still need to be addressed and both

technological as well as social knots need to be united before the vision of IoT
becomes a reality. The central issues are how to achieve full interoperability
between interconnected devices, and how to provide them with a high degree of
smartness by enabling their adaptation and autonomous behaviour, while
guaranteeing trust, security, and privacy of the users and their data [3]. More-
over, IoT will pose several new problems concerning issues related to efficient
utilization of resources in low-powered resource constrained objects.

Several industrial, standardization and research bodies are currently involved in

the activity of development of solutions to fulfil the technological requirements
of IoT.

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The objective of this paper is to provide the reader a comprehensive discussion
on the current state of the art of IoT, with particular focus on what have been
done in the areas of protocol, algorithm and system design and development, and
what are the future research and technology trends.

The rest of the report is organized as follows. Section 2 presents the vision of IoT.
Section 3 discusses enabling technologies of IoT. Section 4 presents some specific
applications of IoT in various industries. Section 5 presents a generic layered
architectural framework for IoT and various issues involved in different layers.
Section 6 identifies the key technologies involved in IoT. Section 7 presents some of
the challenges in deploying the concept of IoT in the real world, and Section 8 future
research areas in the domain of IoT and Section 9 concludes the report.

1.1 Definition

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a computing concept that describes a future

where everyday physical objects will be connected to the Internet and will be
able to identify themselves to other devices. The term is closely identified with
RFID as the method of communication, although it could also include other
sensor technologies, other wireless technologies, QR codes, etc.

In the context of “Internet of Things” a “thing” could be defined as a

real/physical or digital/virtual entity that exists and move in space and time and
is capable of being identified. Things are commonly identified either by assigned
identification numbers, names and/or location addresses.

The Internet of Things allows people and things to be connected Anytime,

Anyplace, with Anything and Anyone, ideally using Any path/network and Any
service. The Internet of Things implies a symbiotic interaction among the
real/physical, the digital/virtual worlds: physical entities have digital
counterparts and virtual representation; things become context aware and they
can sense, communicate, interact, exchange, data, information and knowledge.
Fig.1 shows how IOT connects people and things together at any place, anytime and
anywhere.

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2. VISION OF IOT
In the research communities, IoT has been defined from various different
perspectives and hence numerous definitions for IoT exist in the literature. The
reason for apparent fuzziness of the definition stems from the fact that it is
syntactically composed of two terms—Internet and things. The first one pushes
towards a network oriented vision of IoT, while the second tends to move the
focus on generic objects to be integrated into a common framework [2].
However, the terms ‘Internet’ and ‘things’, when put together assume a meaning
which introduces a disruptive level of innovation into the ICT world. In fact, IoT
semantically means a “world-wide network of interconnected objects uniquely
addressable, based on standard communication protocols” [4]. This implies that a
huge number of possibly heterogeneous objects are involved in the process. In
IoT, unique identification of objects and the representation and storing of
exchanged information is the most challenging issue. This brings the third
perspective of IoT—semantic perspective. In Fig. 1, the main concepts,
technologies and standards are highlighted and classified with reference to the
three visions of IoT [2]. The diagram clearly depicts that IoT paradigm will lead
to the convergence of the three visions of IoT.

From the perspective of things, the focus of IoT is on how to integrate generic
objects into a common framework and the things under investigation are radio
frequency identification (RFID) tags. The term IoT, in fact, is attributed to the
Auto-ID labs [5], a world-wide network of academic research laboratories in the
field of networked RFID and emerging sensing technologies. These institutions,
since their establishment, have focussed their efforts to design the architecture of
IoT integrated with EPC global [6]. These efforts have been primarily towards
development of the electronic product code (EPC) to support the use of RFID in
the world-wide modern trading networks, and to create the industry-driven
global standards for the EPC global Network. These standards are mainly
designed to improve object visibility (i.e., the traceability of an object and the
awareness of its status, current location etc.). While, this is an important step
towards the deployment of IoT, it makes the scope of IoT much narrower. In a

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which the only objects are RFIDs. Similarly, unique/universal/ubiquitous
identifier (UID) architecture defined in [7] which attempts to develop
middleware-based solutions for global visibility of objects also narrows down
the scope of IoT. An IoT vision statement, which goes well beyond a mere
RFID-centric approach, is proposed by CASAGRAS consortium [8]. The
CASAG-RAS consortium (i) proposes a vision of IoT as a global infrastructure
which connects both virtual and physical generic objects and (ii) highlights the
importance of including existing and evolving Internet and network
developments in this vision. From this perspective, IoT becomes the natural
enabling architecture for the deployment of independent federated ser-vices and
applications, characterized by a high degree of autonomous data capture, event
transfer, network connectivity and interoperability.

While the perspective of things focuses on integrating generic objects into a

common framework, the perspective of ‘Internet’ pushes towards a network-oriented
definition.
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According to IPSO (IP for Smart Objects) alliance [8], a forum formed in the
year
the IP stack is a light-weight protocol that already connects a large number of
communicating devices and runs on battery-operated devices. This guarantees
that IP has all the qualities to make IoT a reality. It is likely that through an
intelligent adaptation of IP and by incorporating IEEE 802.15.4 protocol into the
IP architecture, and by adoption of 6LoWPAN [9], a large-scale deployment of
IoT will be a reality.

As mentioned earlier in this section, semantic oriented IoT visions have also
been proposed in the literature [10– 13]. The idea behind this proposition is that
the number of items involved in the future Internet is destined to become
extremely high. Therefore, issues pertaining how to represent, store,
interconnect, search, and organize information generated by the IoT will become
very challenging. In this context, semantic technologies will play a key role. in
fact, these technologies can exploit appropriate modelling solutions for things
description, reasoning over data generated by IoT, semantic execution
environments and architectures that accommodate IoT requirements and scalable
storing and communication infrastructure [ 10].

A further vision correlated with the IoT is the so called web of things [14].
According to this vision of IoT, web standards are reused to connect and
integrate into the web every-day-life objects that contain an embedded device or
computer.

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3. ENABLING TECHNOLOGIES

3.1. Energy:
This concern about low-power chipset having new and efficient and compact
battery cells like fuel cells, polymer batteries which can help in case of IoT.

3.2. Intelligence:
The devices should have capabilities of context awareness and inter-machine
communication.

3.3. Communication:
The devices should new, smart multi-frequency band antennas, integrated on-
chip and made of new materials that will enable the devices to communicate.

3.4. Integration:
Integration of smart devices into packaging, or better, into the products themselves
will allow a significant cost saving and increase the eco-friendliness of the products.

3.5. Interoperability:
It means communication of different protocols by using some protocol stack.
Two devices might not be interoperable even if they belong to same
standards.

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4. APPLICATIONS OF IOT

The potentialities offered by the IoT make it possible to develop numerous

applications based on it, of which only a few applications are currently deployed.
In future, there will be intelligent applications for smarter homes and offices,
smarter transportation systems, smarter hospitals, smarter enterprises and
factories. In the following subsections, some of the important example
applications of IoT are briefly discussed.

Fig 3. Applications of IOT

4.1 Aerospace and Aviation Industry

Internet of Things can help to improve safety and security of products and
services by reliably identifying counterfeit products and elements. The aviation
industry, for example, is vulnerable to the problem of suspected unapproved
parts (SUP). An SUP is an aircraft part that is not guaranteed to meet the
requirements of an approved aircraft part (e.g., counterfeits, which do not
conform to the strict quality constraints of the aviation industry).

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Thus, SUPs seriously violate the security standards of an aircraft. Aviation
authorities report that at least 28 accidents or incidents in the United States have
been caused by counterfeits [21]. Apart from time-consuming material analyses,
verifying the authenticity of aircraft parts can be performed by inspecting the
accompanying documents, which can be easily forged. It is possible to solve this
problem by introducing electronic pedigrees for certain categories of aircraft
parts, which document their origin and safety-critical events during their
lifecycle (e.g., modifications). By storing these pedigrees within a decentralized
database as well as on RFID tags, which are securely attached to aircraft parts,
an authentication (verification of digital signatures, comparison of the pedigree
on RFID tags and within the database) of these parts can be performed prior to
installing them in an aircraft. In this way, safety and operational reliability of
aircrafts can be significantly improved.

4.2 Automotive Industry

Advanced cars, trains, buses as well as bicycles are becoming equipped with
advanced sensors, actuators with increased processing powers. Applications in
the automotive industry include the use of smart things to monitor and report
various parameters from pressure in tires to proximity of other vehicles. Radio
Frequency Identification technology has already been used to streamline vehicle
production, improve logistics, increase quality control and improve customer
services. Radio Frequency Identification technology provides real-time data in
the manufacturing processes, maintenance operations and offers new ways of
managing recalls more effectively. Dedicated Short Range Communication
(DSRC) technology will possibly help in achieving higher bit rates and reducing
interference with other equipment. Vehicle-to vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-
infrastructure (V2I) communications will significantly advance Intelligent
Transportation Systems (ITS) applications such as vehicle safety services and
traffic management and will be fully integrated in the IoT infrastructure.

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4.3 Telecommunications Industry

IoT will create the possibility of merging of diverse telecommunication

technologies and create new services. An illustrative example is the use of GSM,
NFC (Near Field Communication), low power Bluetooth, WLAN, multi-hop
networks, GPS and sensor networks together with SIM-card technology. In these
types of applications the reader (i.e., tag) is a part of the mobile phone, and
different applications share the SIM-card. NFC enables communications among
objects in a simple and secure way just by having them close to each other. The
mobile phone can therefore be used as a NFC reader and transmit the read data to
a central server. When used in a mobile phone, the SIM-card plays an important
role as storage for the NFC data and authentication credentials (like ticket
numbers, credit card accounts, ID information etc). Things can join networks and
facilitate peer-to-peer communication for specialized purposes or to increase
robustness of communications channels and networks. Things can form ad hoc
peer-to-peer networks in disaster situations to keep the flow of vital information
going in case of telecommunication infrastructure failures.

4.4 Medical and Healthcare Industry

IoT will have many applications in the healthcare sector, with the possibility of
using the cell phone with RFID-sensor capabilities as a platform for monitoring
of medical parameters and drug delivery. The advantage gained is in prevention
and easy monitoring of diseases, ad hoc diagnosis and providing prompt medical
attention in cases of accidents. Implantable and addressable wireless devices can
be used to store health records that can save a patient’s life in emergency
situations, especially for people with diabetes, cancer, coronary heart disease,
stroke, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, cognitive impairments, seizure
disorders and Alzheimer’s disease. Edible, biodegradable chips can be
introduced into human body for guided actions. Paraplegic persons can have
muscular stimuli delivered via an implanted smart thing controlled electrical
simulation system in order to restore movement functions.

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4.5 Independent Living

IoT applications and services will have an important impact on independent

living by providing support for an aging population by detecting the activities of
daily living using wearable and ambient sensors, monitoring social interactions
using wearable and ambient sensors, monitoring chronic disease using wearable
vital signs sensors, and in body sensors. With emergence of pattern detection and
machine learning algorithms, the things in a patient’s environment would be able
to watch out and care for the patient. Things can learn regular routines and raise
alerts or send out notifications in anomaly situations. These services can be
merged with the medical technology services, mentioned in Sect. 5.4.

4.6 Pharmaceutical Industry

For pharmaceutical products, security and safety is of utmost importance. In IoT

paradigm, attaching smart labels to drugs, tracking them through the supply
chain and monitoring their status with sensors has many potential benefits. For
example, items requiring specific storage conditions, e.g. maintenance of a cool
chain, can be continuously monitored and discarded if conditions were violated
during transport. Drug tracking and e-pedigrees allow for the detection of
counterfeit products and keep the supply chain free of fraudsters. Counterfeiting
is a common practice in this area as illustrated in [22], and it particularly affects
the developing countries. The smart labels on the drugs can also directly benefit
patients, e.g. by enabling storing of the package insert, informing consumers of
dosages and expiration dates, and assuring the authenticity of the medication. In
conjunction with a smart medicine cabinet that reads information transmitted by
the drug labels, patients can be reminded to take their medicine at appropriate
intervals and patient compliance can be monitored.

4.7 Retail, Logistics and Supply Chain Management

IoT can provide several advantages in retail and supply chain management
(SCM) operations. For example, with RFID-equipped items and smart shelves

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that track the present items in real time, a retailer can optimize many applications
[23]. For example, he can make automatic checking of goods receipt, real time
monitoring of stocks, tracking out-of-stocks or the detection of shoplifting. IoT
can provide a large savings potential in a retail store, since it has been found that
3.9% of sales loss happens worldwide when shelves go empty and customers
return with getting the desired products [24]. Furthermore, IoT can help making
the data from the retail store available for optimizing the logistics of the whole
supply chain. If manufacturers know the stock and sales data from retailers, they
can produce and ship the right quantities of products, thus avoiding the situation
of over-production or underproduction. The logistic processes from supply
chains in many industry sectors can benefit from exchanging of RFID data.
Moreover, environmental issues can be better tackled. The carbon footprint of
logistics and supply chain processes can be optimized based on the availability
of dynamic and fine-grained data collected in the real world directly by some of
the things of IoT, such as trucks, pallets, individual product items etc. In the
shops, IoT can offer many applications like guidance in the shop according to a
pre-selected shopping list, fast payment solutions like automatically check-out
using biometrics, detection of potential allergen in a given product, personalized
marketing, verification of the cool chain, etc. Commercial buildings will also
benefit from smart building functionalities.

4.8 Manufacturing Industry

By linking items with information technology, either through embedded smart

devices or through the use of unique identifiers and data carriers that can interact
with an intelligent supporting network infrastructure and information systems,
production processes can be optimized and the entire lifecycle of objects, from
production to disposal can be monitored. By tagging items and containers,
greater transparency can be gained about the status of the shop floor, the location
and disposition of lots, and the status of production machines. The fine grained
information serves as input data for refined production schedules and improved
logistics.

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4.9 Process Industry

In many plants of the oil and gas industry, scalable architectures are being used
that consider possibilities for plug-and-play new ID methods combined with
sensing/actuating integrated with the IoT infrastructure and integrate the wireless
monitoring of petroleum personnel in critical onshore and offshore operations,
container tracking, tracking of drill string components pipes, monitoring and
managing of fixed equipment etc. A review of high-impact accidents in the
chemical and petrochemical sectors in the UK [25] has observed some common
features in these disasters, such as lack of understanding as well as poor
management of storage, process, and chemical segregation. IoT can help in
reducing the number of accidents in the oil and gas industry by equipping the
containers of hazardous chemicals with intelligent wireless sensor nodes.

4.10 Environment Monitoring

Utilization of wireless identifiable devices and other IoT technologies in green

applications and environmental conservation are one of the most promising
market segments in the future. There will be an increased usage of wireless
identifiable devices in environmentally friendly programs worldwide.

4.11 Transportation Industry

IoT offers solutions for fare collection and toll systems, screening of passengers
and bags boarding commercial carriers and the goods moved by the international
cargo system that support the security policies of the governments and the
transportation industry, to meet the increasing demand for security in the globe.
Monitoring traffic jams through cell phones of the users and deployment of
intelligent transport systems (ITS) will make the transportation of goods and
people more efficient. Transportation companies would become more efficient in
packing containers since the containers can self- scan and weigh themselves. Use
of IoT technologies for managing passenger luggage in airports and airline
operations will enable automated tracking and sorting, increased per-bag read
rates, and increased security.

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4.12 Agriculture and Breeding

The regulations for traceability of agricultural animals and their movements

require the use of technologies like IoT, making possible the real time detection
of animals, for example during outbreaks of contagious disease. Moreover, in
many cases, countries give subsidies depending on the number of animals in a
herd and other requirements, to farms with cattle, sheep, and goats. As the
determination of the number is difficult, there is always the possibility of frauds.
Good identification systems can help minimize this fraud. Therefore, with the
application of identification systems, animal diseases can be controlled,
surveyed, and prevented. Official identification of animals in national, intra
community, and international commerce is already in place, while at the same
time, identification of livestock that are vaccinated or tested under official
disease control or eradication is also possible. Blood and tissue specimens can be
accurately identified, and the health status of herds, regions, and countries can be
certified by using IoT. With IoT, single farmers may be able to deliver the crops
directly to the consumers not only in a small region like in direct marketing or
shops but in a wider area. This will change the whole supply chain which is
mainly in the hand of large companies, now, but can change to a more direct,
shorter chain between producers and consumers.

4.13 Media, Entertainment Industry

Deployment of IoT technologies will enable ad hoc news gathering based on

locations of the users. The news gathering could happen by querying IoT, to see
which multi-media-capable devices are present at a certain location, and sending
them a (financial) offer to collect multimedia footage about a certain event. Near
field communication tags can be attached to posters for providing more
information by connecting the reader to an URI address that contains detailed
information related to the poster.

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4.14 Insurance Industry

Often the introduction of IoT technology is perceived as a grave invasion on

privacy of individuals. However, sometimes people are willing to trade privacy
for a better service or a monetary benefit. One example is car insurance. If
insurance clients are willing to accept electronic recorders in their car, which are
able to record acceleration, speed, and other parameters, and communicate this
information to their insurer, they are likely to get a cheaper rate or premium [26].
The insurer can save money by being involved in a very early stage of an
impending accident and can trigger the most economic actions. A part of the
savings can be given to the customers through discounts on insurance premiums.
The same applies for other assets such as buildings, machinery, etc., that are
equipped with IoT technology. In these cases the technology mostly helps in
preventing large-scale maintenance operations or allows for much cheaper
predictive maintenance before an incident occurs.

4.15 Recycling

IoT and wireless technologies can be used to advance the efficiency and
effectiveness of numerous important city and national environmental programs,
including the monitoring of vehicle emissions to help supervise air quality, the
collection of recyclable materials, the reuse of packaging resources and
electronic parts, and the disposal of electronic waste (RFID used to identify
electronic subcomponents of PCs, mobile phones, and other consumer
electronics products to increase the reuse of these parts and reduce e-waste).
Radio Frequency Identification continues to provide greater visibility into the
supply chain by helping companies more efficiently track and manage
inventories, thereby reducing unnecessary transportation requirements and fuel
usage.

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5. ARCHITECTURE OF IOT

Implementation of IoT is based on an architecture consisting of several layers: from the

field data acquisition layer at the bottom to the application layer at the top. The layered
architecture is to be designed in a way that can meet the requirements of various
industries, enterprises, societies, institutes, governments etc. Figure 2 presents a generic
layered architecture for IoT [2]. The layered architecture has two distinct divisions with
an Internet layer in between to serve the purpose of a common media for
communication. The two layers at the bottom con-tribute to data capturing while the two
layers at the top are responsible for data utilization in applications. The functionalities of
the various layers are discussed briefly in the following:

– Edge layer: this hardware layer consists of sensor networks, embedded systems,
RFID tags and readers or other soft sensors in different forms. These entities are
the primary data sensors deployed in the field. Many of these hardware elements
provide identification and information storage (e.g. RFID tags), information
collection (e.g. sensor networks), information processing (e.g. embedded edge
processors), communication, control and
actuation.

– Access gateway layer: the first stage of data handling happens at this layer. It

care of message routing, publishing and subscribing and also performs

cross platform communication, if required.

– Middleware layer: this is one of the most critical layers that operates in bi-
directional mode. It acts as an interface between the hardware layer at the bottom
and the application layer at the top. It is responsible for critical functions such as
device management and information management and also takes care of issues
like data filtering, data aggregation, semantic analysis, access control,
information discovery such as EPC (Electronic Product Code) information
service and ONS (Object Naming Service).

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 INTERNET OF THINGS

– Application layer: this layer at the top of the stack is responsible for delivery of
various applications to different users in IoT. The applications can be from
different industry verticals such as: manufacturing, logistics, retail, environment,
public safety, healthcare, food and drug etc. With the increasing maturity of RFID
technology, numerous applications are evolving which will be under the umbrella
of IoT.

Fig 4. Different Layers of IoT Communication Protocol Stack

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6. KEY TECHNOLOGIES

6.1 IDENTIFICATION TECHNOLOGY

The function of identification is to map a unique identifier or UID (globally

unique or unique within a particular scope), to an entity so as to make it
retrievable and identifiable without ambiguity. UIDs may be built as a single
quantity or out of a collection of attributes such that the combination of their
values is unique. In the vision of IoT, things have a digital identity (described by
unique identifiers), are identified with a digital name and the relationships
among things can be specified in the digital domain. IoT deployment will require
the development of new technologies that need to address the global ID schemes,
identity management, identity encoding/encryption, authentication and
repository management using identification and addressing schemes and the
creation of global directory lookup services and discovery for IoT applications
with various unique identifier schemes.

6.2 IOT ARCHITECTURE TECHNOLOGY

The middleware (a software layer interposed between the technological and

application levels) architectures proposed in the last couple of years for IoT often
follow the service oriented architecture (SOA) approach. The adoption of the
SOA principles allows for decomposing complex and monolithic systems into
applications consisting of ecosystem of simpler and well-defined components.
The use of common interfaces and standard protocols gives a horizontal view of
an enterprise system. Therefore, the development of business process of
designing workflows of coordinated services, which eventually are associated
with objects actions. An SOA approach also allows for software and hardware
reuse, because it does not impose a specific technology for service
implementation [15]. Figure 3 presents a generic SOA based architecture for the
IoT middleware. In the service oriented architecture (SoA), it becomes
imperative for the providers and requestors to communicate meaningfully with
each other despite the heterogeneous nature of the underlying information

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structures, business artifacts, and other documents. This requirement is termed as
semantic interoperability. Often technology is perceived to be the biggest
impediment to effective collaboration and integration between requestors and
providers; however, it is usually the problem of semantic interoperability which
is the root cause. Semantic interoperability can be achieved between
heterogeneous information systems (service providers and service requestors) in
a multitude of ways. On one extreme, development of comprehensive shared
information models can facilitate semantic interoperability among the participant
applications and businesses. However, the problem with this approach is its
rigidity, which translates to inflexibility. On the other extreme, semantic
interoperability can be achieved by providing appropriate semantic mediators
(translators) at each participant´c6s end to facilitate the conversion to the
information format which the participant understands. Most often systems use a
combination of context independent shared information models coupled with
context specific information specialization approaches to achieve semantic
interoperability.

6.3 COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY

The applications of IoT form an extensive design space with many dimensions
that include several issues and parameters, some of which are mentioned below.
– Deployment: onetime, incremental or random.
– Mobility: occasional or continuous performed by either selected or all things
in the selected environment.
– Cost, size, resources, and energy: very much resource-constrained or
unlimited resources.
– Heterogeneity: a single type of thing or diverse sets of different
properties and hierarchies.
– Communication modality: single-hop or multi-hop communication.
– Infrastructure: different applications exclude, allow or require the use of
fixed infrastructure.
– Network topology: single hop, star, multi-hop, mesh or multi-tier.
– Coverage: sparse, dense or redundant.
– Connectivity: continuous, occasional or sporadic.

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– Network size: ranging from tens of nodes to thousands.
– Lifetime: few hours, several months to many years.
– QoS requirements: real-time constraints, tamper resistance, unobtrusiveness etc.

Such an extensive design space obviously makes IoT application development a

complicated process. One approach may be is to make the design for the most
restrictive point in the design space, e.g. minimum thing capabilities, high
mobility etc. However, often there is no such global minimum and it may be
desirable to exploit the characteristics of the various points in the design space.
This implies that no single hardware and software platform will be sufficient to
support the whole design space. Complex and heterogeneous systems will be a
natural requirement.

6.4 NETWORKING TECHNOLOGY

The IoT deployment requires developments of suitable network technology for

implementing the vision of IoT to reach out to objects in the physical world and
to bring them into the Internet. Technologies like RFID, short-range wireless
communication and sensor networks are means to achieve the network
connectivity, while Internet protocol version 6 (IPv6), with its expanded address
space, enables addressing, connecting and tracking things. In IoT paradigm,
security, scalability, and cross platform compatibility between diverse networked
systems will be essential requirements. In this context, the network technologies
havae to offer solutions that can offer the viability of connecting almost anything
to the network at a reduced cost. Today, IP provides end to end communication
between devices without any requirement of an intermediate protocol translation
gateway. Protocol gateways are inherently complex to design, manage, and
deploy and with the end to end architecture of IP, there are no protocol
translation gateways involved. New scalable architectures designed specifically
for the ubiquitous sensor networks communications will allow for networks of
billions of devices. Improvements in techniques for secure and reliable wireless
communication protocols will enable mission-critical applications for ubiquitous
sensor networks based on wireless identifiable devices.

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6.5 SOFTWARES AND ALGORITHMS

One of the most promising micro operating systems for constrained devices is
Contiki[16]. It provides a full IP stack (both IPv4 and IPv6), supports a local
flash file system, and features a large development community and a
comprehensive set of development tools. One of challenges in building IoT
applications is how to design a common underlying software fabric for different
environments and how to build a coherent application out of a large collection of
diverse software modules. A substantial amount of research and development
effort is currently focussed on service oriented computing for developing
distributed and federated applications to support interoperable machine-to-
machine and thing-to-thing interaction over a network. This is based on the
Internet protocols, and on top of that, defines new protocols to describe and
address the service instances. Service oriented computing loosely organizes the
web services and makes it a virtual network.

6.6 HARDWARE

In the hardware front, research on nano-electronics devices is focused on

miniaturization, low cost and increased functionality in design of wireless
identifiable systems. Silicon IC technology will be used for designing systems
with increased functionalities and possessing enhanced non volatile memory for
sensing and monitoring ambient parameters. Further research is needed in
various areas such as: ultra-low power, low voltage and low leakage designs in
submicron RF CMOS technologies, high-efficiency DC-DC power management
solutions, ultra low power, low voltage controllable nonvolatile memory,
integration of RF MEMS and MEMS devices etc. The focus of research will be
particularly on highly miniaturized integrated circuits that will include: (i) multi
RF, adaptive and reconfigurable front ends, (ii) HF/UHF/SHF/EHF, (iii)
memory- EEPROM/FRAM/Polymer,(iv) multi communication protocols, (v)
digital processing, and (vi) security, including tamper resistance
countermeasures, and technology to thwart side-channel attacks.

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IOT will create new services and new business opportunities for system
providers to service the communication demands of potentially tens of billion of
devices in future. Following major trends are being observed in use of RFID
tags. Use of ultra low cost tags having very limited features is observed. While
the information is centralized on data servers managed by service operators, the
value of information resides in the data management operations. Use of low cost
tags with enhanced features such as extra memory and sensing capabilities is
also observed. The information is distributed both on centralized data servers and
tags. The value resides in communication and data management, including
processing of data into actionable information. Use of smart fixed or mobile tags
and embedded systems is also witnessed. More functionalities are brought into
the tags bringing in local services. For such tags, information is centralized in the
tags, while the value resides in the communication management to ensure
security and effective synchronization with the network.

6.7 DATA AND SIGNAL PROCESSING TECHNOLOGY

Industrial bodies from different domains have realized the utility of XML as the
underlying language for standardization of business artifacts. Each industry
vertical has come up with standardization bodies to develop XML standards for
its own purpose. The primary objective of such effort is to develop a
standardized way to express the contract, trust, process, workflow, message, and
other data semantics in terms of XML nodes and attributes for the nodes. These
XML vocabularies are then published as generalized document type definition
(DTD) or XML schema for consumption by members of that specific industry
vertical. Since all members follow the same standardized DTD or schema, the
semantic interoperability is achieved.

Initiatives such as International Standard for Metadata Registries (ISO/IEC

11179) and its implementation, e.g., the Universal Data Element Framework
(UDEF) from OpenGroup aim to support semantic interoperability between
structured data that is expressed using different schema and data dictionaries of
vocabularies, by providing globally unique cross-reference identifiers for data
elements that are semantically equivalent, even though they may have different

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names in different XML markup standards.
Finally, semantic web based standards from W3C like DAML (Darpa Agent
Markup Language), RDF (Resource Description Framework) and OWL
(Ontology Working Language) are useful in providing semantic foundations for
dynamic situations involving dynamic discovery of businesses and services. The
intelligent decision-making algorithms will need to trigger activities not on the
basis of a single event (such as an individual observation or sensor
reading).Often these algorithms will have to consider correlation among events
which may possibly require transformation of raw sensor data. Appropriate
toolkits and frameworks already exist for complex event processing, such as
ESPER and DROOLS—and are likely to play useful roles in formulating
machine-readable rules for determining the trigger sequences of events for a
particular activity or process.

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7. STANDARDIZATION IN IoT
Standards should be designed to support a wide range of applications and
address common requirements from a wide range of industry sectors as well as
the needs of the environment, society and individual citizens. Through consensus
processes involving multiple stakeholders, it will be possible to develop
standardized semantic data models and ontologies, common interfaces and
protocols, initially defined at an abstract level, then with example bindings to
specific cross-platform, cross-language technologies such as XML, ASN.1, web
services etc. The use of semantic ontologies and machine-readable codification
should help to overcome ambiguities resulting from human error or differences
and misinterpretation due to different human languages in different regions of
the world, as well as assisting with cross-referencing to additional information
available through other systems. Standards are required for bi-directional
communication and information exchange among things, their environment, their
digital counterparts in the virtual cloud and entities that have an interest in
monitoring, controlling or assisting the things. In addition, the design of
standards for IoT needs to consider efficient and judicial use of energy and
network capacity, as well as respecting other constraints such as those existing
regulations that restrict permitted frequency bands and power levels for radio
frequency communications. As IoT evolves, it may be necessary to review such
regulatory constraints and investigate ways to ensure sufficient capacity for
expansion, such as seeking additional radio spectrum allocation as it becomes
available. A particular challenge in this regard is ensuring global interoperability
particularly for things and devices that make use of radio spectrum. Historically,
various bands of radio spectrum have been allocated for various purposes, such
as broadcast communications (AM, FM, digital audio broadcasting, analogue
terrestrial television, digital terrestrial television), mobile telephony, citizen-band
radio, emergency services communications, wireless internet, short-range radio..
Re-allocation of radio spectrum is a slow process, involving government
agencies, regulators and international bodies such as the International

24
Telecommunications Union (ITU) as well as regional bodies such as the
European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) or the Federal
Communications Commission (FCC). Careful discussions are needed to
minimize disruption to existing users of radio spectrum and to plan for future
needs. In the meantime, many IoT devices using radio spectrum will need to be
capable of using multiple protocols and multiple frequencies. An example of this
is the ISO 18000-6C/EPC global UHF Gen2 standard, which is implemented
using slightly different frequencies within the 860– 960MHz band, depending on
the region of operation, as well as different power levels and different protocols
(at least initially in Europe, where the Listen-Before-Talk protocol was
required). With regard to the IoT paradigm at large, a very interesting
standardization effort has currently started in ETSI [17], which produces globally
applicable ICT-related standards.

Within ETSI, the Machine-to-Machine (M2M) Technical Committee was formed

to conduct standardization activities relevant toM2M systems and sensor
networks.M2M is a real leading paradigm towards IoT, but there has been very
less standardization activities so far in this area. The goals of the ETSI M2M
committee include: development and maintenance of an end-to-end architecture
for M2M, strengthening the standardization efforts on M2M, including sensor
network integration, naming, addressing, location, QoS, security, charging,
management, application, and hardware interfaces [18].

As for the Internet Engineering Taskforce (IETF) activities related to the IoT,
recently Ipv6 over Low PowerWireless PersonalArea Networks (6LoWPAN)
IETF group has been formed [19]. 6LoWPAN has defined a set of protocols that
can be used to integrate sensor nodes into IPv6 networks. Core protocols for
6LoWPAN architecture have already been specified and some commercial
procuts have been launched that implement this protocol suite.

Another working group in IETF’ named routing over low power and lossy
(ROLL) networks, has recently produced RPL routing protocol draft. This will
be the basis for routing over low power and lossy networks including
6LoWPAN.

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It is clear that an emerging idea is to consider the IoT standardization as an
integral part of the future Internet definition and standardization process. This
assertion has been made also by the cluster of European research and
development projects on IoT (CERP-IoT). As presented in its report, the
integration of different things into wider networks, either mobile or fixed, will
allow their interconnection with the future Internet [20].

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8. CHALLENGES & FUTURE TRENDS

The workflows in analyzed enterprise environment, home, office and other smart
spaces in the future will be characterized by cross organization interaction,
requiring the operation of highly dynamic and ad-hoc relationships. At present,
only a very limited ICT support is available, and the following key challenges
exist.
1. Network Foundation—limitations of the current Internet architecture in
terms of mobility, availability, manageability and scalability are some of
the major barriers to IoT.
2. Security, Privacy and Trust—in the domain of security the challenges are:
(a) securing the architecture of IoT– security to be ensured at design time
and execution time,(b) proactive identification and protection of IoT from
arbitrary attacks (e.g. DoS and DDoS attacks) and abuse, and (c) proactive
identification and protection of IoT from malicious software. In the
domain of user privacy, the specific challenges are: (a) control over
personal information (data privacy) and control over individual’s physical
location and movement (location privacy), (b) need for privacy
enhancement technologies and relevant protection laws, and (c) standards,
methodologies and tools for identity management of users and objects. In
the domain of trust, some of the specific challenges are: (a) Need for easy
and natural exchange of critical, protected and sensitive data—e.g. smart
objects will communicate on behalf of users / organizations with services
they can trust, and (b) trust has to be a part of the design of IoT and must
be built in.

3. Managing heterogeneity—managing heterogeneous applications,

environments and devices constitute a major challenge.

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In addition to the above major challenges, some of the other challenges are: (a)
managing large amount of information and mining large volume of data to
provide useful services, (b) designing an efficient architecture for sensor
networking and storage, (c) designing mechanisms for sensor data discovery, (d)
designing sensor data communication protocols— sensor data query,
publish/subscribe mechanisms, (e) developing sensor data stream processing
mechanisms, and (f) sensor data mining—correlation, aggregation filtering
techniques design. Finally, standardizing heterogeneous technologies, devices,
application interfaces etc. will also be a major challenge.

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8.1 DATA AND SIGNAL PROCESSING TECHNOLOGY

There are several areas in which further research is needed for making
deployment of the concept of IoT reliable, robust and efficient. Some of the areas
are identified in the following. In identification technology domain, further
research is needed in development of new technologies that address the global
ID schemes, identity management, identity encoding/ encryption, pseudonimity,
revocable anonymity, authentication of parties, repository management using
identification, authentication and addressing schemes and the creation of global
directory lookup services and discovery services for IoT applications with
various identifier schemes. In architecture design domain, some of the issues that
need attention are: design of distributed open architecture with end-to-end
characteristics, interoperability of heterogeneous systems, neutral access, clear
layering and resilience to physical network disruption, decentralized autonomic
architectures based on peering of nodes etc. In communication protocol domain,
the issues that need to be addressed are: design of energy efficient
communication by multi frequency protocol, communication spectrum and
frequency allocation, software defined radios to remove the needs for hardware
upgrades for new protocols, and design of high performance, scalable algorithms
and protocols. In network technology domain further research is needed on
network on chip technology considering on chip communication architectures for
dynamic configurations design time parameterized architecture with a dynamic
routing scheme and a variable number of allowed virtual connections at each
output. In addition, power-aware network design that turns on and off the links in
response to burst and dips of traffic on demand, scalable communication
infrastructures design on chip to dynamically support the communication among
circuit modules based on varying workloads and /or changing constraints are
some of the important research issues.

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9. CONCLUSION

When we look at today’s state of the art technologies, we get a clear indication
of how the IoT will be implemented on a universal level in the coming years. We
also get an indication of the important aspects that need to be further studied and
developed for making large-scale deployment of IoT a reality.

This report surveyed some of the most important aspects of IoT with particular
focus on what is being done and what are the issues that require further research.
While the current technologies make the concept of IoT feasible, a large number
of challenges lie ahead for making the large-scale real-world deployment of IoT
applications. In the next few years, addressing these challenges will be a
powerful driving force for networking and communication research in both
industrial and academic laboratories.

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