Building Blocks of the Internet of Things: State of the Art and Beyond

ICT has simplified and automated many tasks in the industry and services sector. Computers can monitor and control physical devices from very small to very large scales: they are needed in order to produce semiconductor wafers and can help operating ships, airplanes or manufacturing devices. Until some years ago though, these solutions were monolithic and thus application specific. In the field of monitoring and control, the wide adoption of modular design patterns and standardization, together with the improvements in communication technologies, paved the way to the diffusion of single component products that could be integrated as building blocks for ever more complex applications. An array of embedded devices and autoID technologies are now available as well as off-the-shelf platforms (ref Oracle, IBM, Arduino, Arch Rock, Sensinode) which can be used and customized for addressing specific purposes. One of the biggest paradigms behind this trend is the Internet of Things (IoT) which foresees a world permeated with embedded smart devices, often called “smart objects”, interconnected through the Internet1. These devices should help blending together the digital and the physical world by providing Things with “identities and virtual personalities” (European Technology Platform on Smart Systems Integration [EPoSS], 2008) and by providing pervasive sensing and actuation features. This scenario is very challenging as not all the building blocks of the IoT are yet in place. Standardization efforts are essential and have only recently been made and a reference architecture is still missing. Other researches on this topic nowadays focus on hardware and software issues such as energy harvesting, efficient cryptography, interoperability, communication protocols and semantics. The advent of IoT will also raise social, governance, privacy and security issues. This work provides a historical and conceptual introduction to the IoT topic. In the second part of the chapter, a wide perspective on the aforementioned issues is provided. The work also outlines key aspects in the process of moving from the current state of the art of IoT, where objects have digital identities, towards a network of objects having digital personalities and being able to interact with each other and with the environment. In the last part, a selection of the possible impacts of the IoT is analyzed.