Internet of Things

The new topic on the subject is Internet of Things. In these past weeks, we discussed this new concept of the Internet Architecture.

First of all, we have to redefine the concept “thing”: a thing may be defined as a real/physical, digital/virtual entity that exists, moves in time and space, and is able to be identified. So, anything could be part of this new network, even a bottle of water.  The only thing needed is an identification of this thing, and the capability of connecting the Internet.

Once defined a “thing”, let’s define the IoT network: is going to be a global network infrastructure, linking physical and virtual objects through the exploitation of data capture and communication capabilities. This infrastructure will include the existing Internet, and will offer a new kind of services characterized by a high degree of autonomous data capture, event transfer, network connectivity and interoperability.

The application of IoT is on almost all fields, but nowadays is extended in aeronautics, automotive, logistics, pharmaceutics… Because of that, the inversion in IoT is at the order of the day in the EU. Moreover, in South Korea, they are already using IoT to manage traffic control, pollution control, weather monitoring, fire monitoring… and in China has been created a city to develop the IoT, where everything is connected through WSN.

The first goal in order of performing the IoT network is identifying the objects (real things). Nowadays, the mainly identifiers are barcodes, the classical ones, with different sized vertical bars, and the two dimensional barcodes, such as QR codes. Also systems as RFID and NFC are currently working on.

Another way to transmit the identity to the virtual world is through radio frequency, such as sensors. The sensor networks actually work over IPv6, on a protocol called 6LoWPAN, which is really easy to configure, and has a good scalability, and is probably going to be the protocol used in IoT.

Finally we have talked, about the concept of network virtualization: it is defined by decoupling the roles of the traditional Internet service providers into two independent entities: infrastructure providers, who manage the physical infrastructure, and service providers, who create virtual networks by aggregating resources from multiple infrastructure providers and offer end-to-end services.