Survey PaperInternet of things: Vision, applications and research challenges
Introduction
Nowadays, around two billions people around the world use the Internet for browsing the Web, sending and receiving emails, accessing multimedia content and services, playing games, using social networking applications and many other tasks. While more and more people will gain access to such a global information and communication infrastructure, another big leap forward is coming, related to the use of the Internet as a global platform for letting machines and smart objects communicate, dialogue, compute and coordinate.
It is predictable that, within the next decade, the Internet will exist as a seamless fabric of classic networks and networked objects. Content and services will be all around us, always available, paving the way to new applications, enabling new ways of working; new ways of interacting; new ways of entertainment; new ways of living.
In such a perspective, the conventional concept of the Internet as an infrastructure network reaching out to end-users’ terminals will fade, leaving space to a notion of interconnected “smart” objects forming pervasive computing environments [1]. The Internet infrastructure will not disappear. On the contrary, it will retain its vital role as global backbone for worldwide information sharing and diffusion, interconnecting physical objects with computing/communication capabilities across a wide range of services and technologies.
This innovation will be enabled by the embedding of electronics into everyday physical objects, making them “smart” and letting them seamlessly integrate within the global resulting cyberphysical infrastructure. This will give rise to new opportunities for the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) sector, paving the way to new services and applications able to leverage the interconnection of physical and virtual realms.
Within such perspective, the term “Internet-of-Things” (IoT) is broadly used to refer to both: (i) the resulting global network interconnecting smart objects by means of extended Internet technologies, (ii) the set of supporting technologies necessary to realize such a vision (including, e.g., RFIDs, sensor/actuators, machine-to-machine communication devices, etc.) and (iii) the ensemble of applications and services leveraging such technologies to open new business and market opportunities [2], [3].
In this survey article, we aim at providing a holistic perspective on the Internet-of-Things concept and development, including a critical revision of application fields, enabling technologies and research challenges. As a matter of fact, the research community active on IoT-related themes is still highly fragmented, and, to a large extent, focused around single application domains or single technologies. Further, the involvement of the networking and communications scientific communities is still limited, despite the high potential impact of their contributions on the development of the field [2], [4]. We do believe that this fragmentation is potentially harmful for the development and successful adoption of IoT technologies. We therefore hope this survey can help in bridging existing communities, fostering cross-collaborations and ensuring that IoT-related challenges are tackled within a system-level perspective, ensuring that the research activities can then be turned into successful innovation and industry exploitation.
The remainder of this article is organized as follows. In Section 2 we introduce the IoT vision and define the main related concepts. In Section 3 we analyze the relevant research and technology contexts, including related fields and their potential contribution towards the realization of the IoT vision. In Section 4 we present the main research challenges ahead of us in the IoT landscape. In Section 5 we discuss the security challenges introduced by IoT technologies and applications. An analysis of the potential application fields and impact areas is reported in Section 6. A survey of IoT related-on-going initiatives is presented in Section 7. Section 8 concludes the survey with a number of remarks on potential approaches to tackle the challenges identified.
Section snippets
Vision and concept
The Internet-of-Things is emerging as one of the major trends shaping the development of technologies in the ICT sector at large [3], [5], [6], [2]. The shift from an Internet used for interconnecting end-user devices to an Internet used for interconnecting physical objects that communicate with each other and/or with humans in order to offer a given service encompasses the need to rethink anew some of the conventional approaches customarily used in networking, computing and service
Research context
As technology progresses, more and more processing power, storage and battery capacity become available at relatively low cost and with limited space requirements. This trend is enabling the development of extremely small-scale electronic devices with identification/communication/computing capabilities, which could be embedded in the environment or in common objects. Such a class of devices could be used, as described in the previous Section, to enable a set of novel applications and services,
Research challenges
The key idea behind the Internet-of-Things concept, as outlined in Section 2, resides in the huge potential of embedding computing and communication capabilities into objects of common use. Two additional features should also be properly accounted for:
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Identification. Each object should be identifiable. Depending on the specific scenarios, objects may require to be uniquely identified, or to be identified as belonging to a given class (e.g., this object is a pen, regardless of which pen it is).
Security
Security represents a critical component for enabling the widespread adoption of IoT technologies and applications. Without guarantees in terms of system-level confidentiality, authenticity and privacy the relevant stakeholders are unlikely to adopt IoT solutions on a large scale. In early-stage IoT deployments (e.g., based on RFIDs only), security solutions have mostly been devised in an ad hoc way. This comes from the fact that such deployments were usually vertically integrated, with all
Applications and impact areas
The concept of Internet-of-Things, with its vision of Internet-connected objects of various capabilities and form factors, could boost the role of ICT as innovation enabler in a variety of application markets.
One of the technological pillars of the Internet-of-Things, namely RFID technology, has already been incorporated into a wide array of products. The number of RFID tags sold in 2011 accounted to 2.88 tags (source: www.idtechex.com), with an estimated market value of $ 5.84 billions
Related on-going initiatives
A number of large-scale initiatives on IoT are active in the US, in Europe, in Japan, China, Korea and other countries. In the following subsection we will briefly report on the most relevant ones.
Besides research initiatives, standardization activities are also of key importance in order to ensure a successful widespread adoption of IoT technologies and services. In Section 7.2 we briefly report on the most relevant ones.
Conclusions
The Internet-of-Things may represent the next big leap ahead in the ICT sector. The possibility of seamlessly merging the real and the virtual world, through the massive deployment of embedded devices, opens up new exciting directions for both research and business.
In this survey article, we provided an overview of the key issues related to the development of IoT technologies and services. A number of research challenges has been identified, which are expected to become major research trends in
Acknowledgments
The work of D. Miorandi and F. De Pellegrini was supported by the EC within the framework of the BIONETS Project IST-FET-SAC-FP6-027748, www.bionets.eu. The authors would like to acknowledge Dr. V. Osmani and Dr. G. Russello for the comments provided while preparing this work. The authors also acknowledge the iCore Consortium for the feedback and suggestions provided on an early version of the article.
Daniele Miorandi is the head of the iNSPIRE Area at CREATE-NET, Italy. He received a PhD in Communications Engineering from Univ. of Padova, Italy, in 2005, and a Laurea degree (summa cum lauda) in Communications Engineering from Univ. of Padova, Italy, in 2001. He joined CREATE-NET in Jan. 2005, where he is leading the iNSPIRE (Networking and Security Solutions for Pervasive Computing Systems: Research & Experimentation). His research interests include bio-inspired approaches to networking and
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Daniele Miorandi is the head of the iNSPIRE Area at CREATE-NET, Italy. He received a PhD in Communications Engineering from Univ. of Padova, Italy, in 2005, and a Laurea degree (summa cum lauda) in Communications Engineering from Univ. of Padova, Italy, in 2001. He joined CREATE-NET in Jan. 2005, where he is leading the iNSPIRE (Networking and Security Solutions for Pervasive Computing Systems: Research & Experimentation). His research interests include bio-inspired approaches to networking and service provisioning in large-scale computing systems, modeling and performance evaluation of wireless networks, prototyping of wireless mesh solutions. Dr. Miorandi has co-authored more than 100 papers in internationally refereed journals and conferences. He serves on the Steering Committee of various international events (WiOpt, Autonomics, ValueTools), for some of which he was a co-founder (Autonomics and ValueTools). He also serves on the TPC of leading conferences in the networking field, including, e.g., IEEE INFOCOM, IEEE ICC, IEEE Globecom. He is a member of IEEE, ACM and ICST.
Sabrina Sicari was born on September 18, 1977 in Catania, Sicily, Italy. She received her laurea degree in Electronical Engineering,110/110 cum laude, from University of Catania, Catania, Italy, in 2002. In March 2006 she got her Ph.D. in Computer and Telecommunications Engineering at the same university. From September 2004 to March 2006 she has been a Visiting Scholar at Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informatica, Politecnico di Milano, Italy. Since May 2006 she works at Dipartimento di Informatica e Comunicazione, Universit degli Studi dell’Insubria in software engineering group (head Prof. Alberto Coen-Porisini). Dr. Sicari is an IEEE member. She is reviewer of Pervasive and Mobile Computing (Elsevier), IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, ACM-Monet, International Journal of Computer Applications in Technology (IJCAT), IEEE ICC’09, IEEE ICC’10, IEEE ISIE’10, S-Cube’09, WiOpt’09, Mobility’11, ICDT 2012,and TPC member of Q2SWinet 2011, Q2SWinet 2010, Q2SWinet 2009, IEEE Globecom’11, IEEE Globecom’10, IEEE ICC’11, GIIS’11, IWCMC ’11, the international workshop SESENA 2010 (co-located with ICSE’10), S-cube’10. Dr. Sicari has been the general co-chair of S-Cube 2009. She has been a Steering Committee member of S-Cube 2010 and guest editor for the ACM Monet Special Issue, named “Sensor, system and Software”. Dr. Sicari is an Editor for Computer Networks (Elsevier) journal since 2008. She is a Steering Commitee member of S-Cube 2012. She is a TPC member of the international conference IWCMC 2012, SENSORNETS 2012, S-Cube 2012, ICDT 2012, Mobility 2012, SNDS 2012, Q2SWinet 2012
Francesco De Pellegrini received the Laurea degree in 2000 and the Ph.D. degree in 2004, both in Telecommunication Engineering, from the University of Padova. During year 2001/2002 he spent one year at Boston University as a visiting scholar. He is currently a senior researcher and Deputy Area Head of the iNspire group at CREATE-NET. His research interests are location detection, multirate systems, routing, wireless mesh networks, VoIP, Ad Hoc and Delay Tolerant Networks. F. De Pellegrini has been a TPC member of IEEE Infocom and a reviewer for several international networking conferences and journals. Francesco serves in the Steering Programm Commitee of Mobiquitous and Complex Conferences. Francesco was the Vice-chair for the first edition of Robocomm.
Imrich Chlamtac is the President of CREATE-NET and the Bruno Kessler Professor at the University of Trento, Italy and has held various honorary and chaired professorships in USA and Europe including the Distinguished Chair in Telecommunications Professorship at the University of Texas at Dallas, Sackler Professorship at Tel Aviv University and University Professorship at the Tech- nical University of Budapest. In the past he was with Technion and UMass, Amherst, DEC Research. Dr. Imrich Chlamtac has made significant contribution to various networking technologies as scientist, educator and entrepreneur. Dr. Chlamtac is the recipient of multiple awards and recognitions including Fellow of the IEEE, Fellow of the ACM, Fulbright Scholar, the ACM Award for Outstanding Contributions to Research on Mobility and the IEEE Award for Outstanding Technical Contributions to Wireless Personal Communications. Dr. Chlamtac published close to four hundred refereed journal, book, and conference articles and is listed among ISIs Highly Cited Researchers in Computer Science. Dr. Chlamtac is the co-author of four books, including the first book on Local Area Networks (1980) and the Amazon.com best seller and IEEE Editor’s Choice Wireless and Mobile Network Architectures, published by John Wiley and Sons (2000). Dr. Chlamtac has widely contributed to the scientific community as founder and Chair of ACM Sigmobile, founder and steering committee chair of some of the lead conferences in net-working, including ACM Mobicom, IEEE/SPIE/ACM OptiComm, CreateNet Mobiquitous, CreateNet WiOpt, IEEE/CreateNet Broadnet, IEEE/CreateNet Tridentcom and IEEE/CreateNet Securecomm conferences. Dr. Chlamtac also serves as the founding Editor in Chief of the ACM/URSI/Springer Wireless Networks (WINET), the ACM/Springer Journal on Special Topics in Mobile Networks and Applications (MONET).