An Enthusiastic Embrace with ‘The Internet of Things’

The Internet of Things (IoT), a new concept in the IT industry, has attracted the globe’s eyesight within this decade. Some critics discuss that the soon coming fifteen years will be the time of a boom of this industry by which will help people create a ‘smart world’. What an excitement and encouraging industry! It must be an unforgettable experience to engage in this IT revolution. Hence, from this week, I will start my journey on discovering the relevant techniques about this brand new industry, and analyzing the benefits and challenges during its development process.


Since it is a brand new term for most of us, first of all, let’s start this discovery journey from getting some general ideas about it. The Internet of Things (IoT) is a term to illustrate the objects all over the world could be connected and communicates with each other via the Internet (Cooper & James 2009, p. 320). Haller, Karnouskos and Schroth. (2008) give a very specific definition as follows:

A world where physical objects are seamlessly integrated into the information network, and where they, the physical objects, can become active participants in business processes. Services are available to interact with these “smart objects” over the Internet, query their state and any information associated with them, taking into account security and privacy issues.

In this way, the IoT could be regarded as a combination of information technologies such as radio-frequency identification (RFID), wireless sensor networks, database management, network addresses protocols, and other techniques. Some experts claim that the IoT is the practical application of current computer technologies which are integrated into a uniform framework to make them work more efficiently and effectively. Accompanied with the development of RFID and IPv6, the IoT has gained significantly progress. However, it is still in the first stage, and there are abundant improvement spaces and creative techniques and standards needed to be introduced into this area.

I will move on my research on this area gradually this semester…





References

Cooper, J & James, A. 2009, ‘Challenges for database management in the Internet of Things’, IETE Technical Review, vol. 26, no. 5, pp. 320-329.

Haller, S., Karnouskos, S. & Schroth, C. 2008, ‘The Internet of Things in an enterprise context’, Future Internet Systems (FIS), vol. 5468, Springer, pp. 14-18.