Internet of Things: Hardware and Software Solutions

To enable Internet of Things in its full capacities, an efficient hardware and software architecture, and its incremental improvements are the necessity. This comes as a urging need to create operable and efficient network of billions of sensors connected to the Internet, representing a fundamental feature of the digital world we know today. At the end, objects connected in a smart way create an environment where object knows what we want, what we like, or what we need, while acting accordingly without causing burden on the user side. Many conventional concepts are changing: Human-to-Machine paradigm (H2M) is increasingly shifting toward the new Machine-to-Machine (M2M) paradigm, while The Next Generation Internet currently aims at interconnecting and making smart objects interoperable in order to realize the vision of the Internet of Things (IoT) at the full capacities. To cope with these issues this Special Issue gathered different contributions that incrementally improve current infrastructures: In paper "Decentralization of Services Through Three Tiers in Wireless Body Area Networks”, authored by Said Lakhal and Zouhair Guennoun present a functional architecture for Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) consisted of three layers: closest, intermediate and farthest. The way it is presented maximises the use of the available resources in respect to the conventional single layer or at two layers architectures. Paper "A Level-Wise Periodic Tree Construction Mechanism for Sleep Scheduling in WSN”, authored by Nachiketa Tarasia, Amulya Ratna Swain, Soham Roy, and Udit Narayana Kar deals with the more efficient network of wirelessly connected sensors in order to improve their energy efficiency. In particular, authors proposed a level wise periodic tree construction algorithm that uses a specific set of nodes to participate in tree construction. The main idea is to put the nodes, which are currently active and have already spent a significant amount of energy, to sleep mode, while giving chances to the leaf nodes, which have comparatively spent less energy, to become active nodes and maintain connectivity. The performance analysis provides promising results.