Internet of Things: Concept, Building blocks, Applications and

Challenges
Riad Abdmeziem, Djamel Tandjaoui
arXiv:1401.6877v1 [cs.CY] 2 Jan 2014

January 28, 2014

Keywords: Internet Of Things, RFID, WSN, The pervasive presence around us of various wire-
Smart Environments, Pervasive computing. less technologies - such as Radio-Frequency IDen-
tification (RFID) tags, sensors, actuators, mobile
phones, etc. in which computing and communication
Abstract systems are seamlessly embedded will form the build-
ing block of the IoT concept [9]. The IoT’s full de-
Internet of things (IoT) constitutes one of the most
ployement will give rise to new opportunities for the
important technology that has the potential to affect
Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)
deeply our way of life, after mobile phones and Inter-
sector, paving the way to new applications, providing
net. The basic idea is that every objet that is around
new ways of working; new ways of interacting; new
us will be part of the network (Internet), interacting
ways of entertainment; new ways of living [2].
to reach a common goal. In another word, the Inter-
net of Things concept aims to link the physical world
to the digital one. Technology advances along with Technology advances along with popular demand
popular demand will foster the wide spread deploye- will foster the wide spread deployement of IoT’s ser-
ment of IoT’s services, it would radically transform vices, it would radically transform our corporations,
our corporations, communities, and personal spheres. communities, and personal spheres. From the per-
In this survey, we aim to provide the reader with a spective of a private user, IoT’s introduction will play
broad overview of the Internet of things concept, its a leading role in several services in both working
building blocks, its applications along with its chal- and domestic fields -such as Domotics, e-health, e-
lenges. learning, security and surveillance, etc. In the same
manner, from the business point of view, IoT will
bring a deep change in the way automation, indus-
1 Introduction trial manufacturing, logistics, business/process man-
agement and transportation of goods and people are
During the past few years, the acess to the Internet
handleled.
has evolved from static (desktop) access to a more
mobile and dynamic one, using several devices - such
as Mobile phones,Tablets, Televisions, etc. In this Implementation of IoT paradigm rely on the inte-
context a novel paradigm named Internet Of Things gration of RFID systems, Wireless Sensor Networks,
(IoT) is rapidly gaining ground. The basic idea is intelligent technologies (using knowledge to solve cer-
that every objet that is around us will be part of the tain problems and mainly covering Artificial Intelli-
network (Internet), interacting to reach a common gence [10]) and nanometer technologie (concentrat-
goal, in another word, the Internet Of thing concept ing on the characteristic and application of materi-
aim to link the physical world to the digital one. als of size between 0.1 and 100 nm). Up to this

1
day, since research of IoT is still embryonic there
exist no common IoT architecture. Nowadays the
Electronic Product Code (EPC) network architec-
ture supported by EPCglobal [1] together with the
Unique/Universal/Ubiquitous IDentifier (UID) archi-
tecture in Japan [16] are the most representative
among others. The main idea underlying EPCglobal
network is to use RFID and wireless technologies to
wrap every day’s live objects and connect them to the
traditional Internet, while, UID provides middleware
based solutions for a global visibility of objects.

Several challenges stand between the conceptual

idea of IoT and its full deployement into our daily
life. Main issues are : making complete interoper-
ability of heteregenous interconnected devices which
require adaptation and autonoumous behaviour while
guaranteeing trust, privacy, and security; networking
Figure 1: Internet of Things paradigm as a result of
aspect is not in rest, low computation and energy
the convergence of different visions
capacities that characterized the things of the IoT
bring ressource effeciency as a fundamental element
in the proposed solutions. Around the globe, several
industrial, standardization and research bodies are
currently involved in the devloppement of solutions
in order to bring answers to the highlighted techno-
logical requirements. shall be the result of the convergence of three main
visions: internet-oriented (middleware), things ori-
In this survey, we aim to provide to the reader an ented (sensors) and semantic-oriented (knowledge) as
overview of the IoT concept, the different enabling shown in Figure 1. Perspective of Things: This
technologies, research challenges and the implications perspective focuses on how to integrate generic ”ob-
of a wide spread diffusion of IoT. The remainder of jects” or ”Things” into a common framework, and the
this paper is organized as follows: in Section 2, def- ”Things” under investigation are RFID tags. RFID
initions of IoT from various perspectives are intro- is considered as a one of the leading technologies [12],
duced. Section 3 introduces the main IoT enabling mainly due to its maturity and low cost, and conse-
technologies. The applications of IoT already avail- quently its strong support from the business com-
able are summarized in Section 4. Section 5 states munity. Nevertheless, IoT is more than a global
the research challenges. Finally Section 6 gives the EPC system where the only objects are RFID tags.
conclusion. Besides that,United Nations (UN) has also stated
that the perspective of ”Things” of IoT goes beyond
RFID. It is stated in a UN report that a new era of
2 Definition and vision ubiquity is coming where the users of the Internet
will be counted in billions, and where humans may
In Internet of things (IoT), huge number of small de- become the minority as generators and receivers of
vices will be connected to the Internet in some way. traffic. Changes brought about by Internet will be
IoT’s definition is usually studied through various dwarfed by those prompted by the networking of ev-
perspectives. According to [10], the IoT paradigm eryday objects.

2
 The consortium CASAGRAS 1 also proposes an Within the latter category falls the IoT vision of
IoT vision statement that goes well beyond a mere the IPSO(IP for Smart Objects) Alliance [8], a forum
”RFID centric” approach. Its members focus on a formed in September 2008 by 25 founding compa-
world where things can automatically communicate nies to promote the Internet Protocol as the network
to computers and each other, providing services to technology for connecting Smart Objects around the
the benefit of the human kind. It not only proposes world. This vision favors the Internet protocols as
IoT would connect both virtual and physical generic the network technology for connecting smart objects
objects as a global infrastructure, but also empha- around the world. According to IPSO, the IP stack
sizes the importance of incorporating the traditional is a lightweight protocol that already connects a huge
Internet related technologies and infrastructures in amount of communicating devices and runs on tiny
the development of IoT. Similarly, other relevant in- and battery operated embedded devices. Reducing
stitutions have stressed the concept that IoT has pri- the complexity of the IP stack in order to design a
marily focused on the ”Things” and that the road to protocol to route IP over things is the promoted idea.
its full deployment has to start from the augmenta-
tion in the Things intelligence. From the thing’s per- Furthermore, as the Internet is running out of ad-
spective, the International Telecommunication Union dresses, in the near future it will be moving to a
(ITU) has given the following definition of the IoT: new protocol, IPv6. The current system, IPv4, has
from anytime, any place connectivity for anyone, we roughly four billion addresses. The new address space
will add a connectivity for anything . The same def- can support (about 3.41038) addresses, which means,
inition is given by the European Commission, it re- to take a commonly used analogy, that it provides
lates to : things having identities and virtual per- enough addresses for every grain of sand on every
sonalities operating in smart spaces using intelligent beach in the world! While it is unlikely that we will
interfaces to connect and communicate within social, be assigning IP addresses to grains of sand, the idea of
environmental, and user contexts [3]. assigning them to each of the more or less 5,000 daily
objects that surround us, is quite appealing. With
Perspective of Internet: “A world where things the right technology in each object (e.g., an RFID
can automatically communicate to computers and tag) and the right network in the surroundings, it
each other providing services to the benefit of the hu- will become easy to locate and catalogue items in a
man kind”, this vision is brought by the CASAGRAS few seconds and to reap the benefits of the vast ar-
consortium, a vision of IoT as a global infrastructure ray of new information that communications among
which connects both virtual and physical generic ob- them will provide. IPv6 is undoubtedly one of the
jects and highlights the importance of including exist- steps to making the Internet of Things a reality[6].
ing and evolving Internet and network developments
in it. In this sense, IoT becomes the natural enabling Reducing the complexity of the IP stack and in-
architecture for the deployment of independent fed- corporating IEEE 802.15.4 into the IP architecture is
erated services and applications, characterized by a looked as the wisest way to to move from the Inter-
high degree of autonomous data capture, event trans- net of Devices to the Internet of Things. According to
fer, network connectivity and interoperability. This the IPSO and 6LoWPAN 2 , the IoT will be deployed
definition leads to the Internet oriented vision of IoT, by means of a sort of simplification of the current
while the perspective of things focuses on integrat- IP to adapt it to any object and make those objects
ing generic objects into a commun framework, the addressable and reachable from any location.
perspective of ”Internet” pushes towards a network
oriented definition. Perspective of Semantics: The basic idea behind
1
is that the number of items involved in the futur In-
Coordination And Support Action for Global RFID-
related Activities and Standardisation 2 IPV6 Low Power Wireless Personnal Area Network

3
ternet Of Things is likely to become very high, thus,
issues related to how to represent, store, intercon-
nect, search, and organize information generated by
the IoT will become very challenging.

Such development will also necessarily create de-

mand for a much wider integration with various ex-
ternal resources, such as data storages, information
services, and algorithms, which can be found in other
units of the same organization, in other organiza-
tions, or on the Internet. Therefore, issues of rep-
resenting, storing, searching, and interconnecting in-
formation generated in IoT will become very chal-
lenging.
In this context, semantic technologies could play a
key role. In fact, these can exploit appropriate mod-
eling solutions for things description, reasoning over
data generated by IoT, semantic execution environ-
ments and architectures that accommodate IoT re-
quirements [9].
Figure 2: IoT Elements

3 IoT elements
computationnal capablilties sensor nodes will have to
The Internet of things is unlikely to rise as a brand be equipped with a battery. While a number of solu-
new class of systems. An incremental develope- tions for increasing energy efficiency at various layers
ment path, along which IoT technologies will be of the OSI model has been devised, the need to re-
progressivly employed to extend existing ICT sys- place batteries from time to time represents a huge
tems/applications, providing additionnal functionali- barrier to the widespread development of IoT. Be-
ties related to the ability of interacting with the phys- sides, nodes in a classical wireless sensor network are
ical realm. This section focuses on the enabling tech- expected to possess a set of common characteristics,
nologies that are expected to form the building blocks and to share a number of common features including
of the IoT, each technology is briefly presented with a full protocol stack. While advances in embedded
its supposed impact on the IoT’s devloppement. Fig- electronics and software are making such a require-
ure 2 gives an overview of the main technologies that ment less and less stringent, solutions able to accom-
will be involved in the future IoT. modate heterogeneity in terms of supported features
should be introduced to ease incremental deployment
[2].
3.1 Sensing, computing and identifi-
cation technologies
Wireless technologies will play a key role in the
The ability of sensing the environement and to self- futur IoT, in a way where the major part of data
organize into ad hoc networks represent an impor- traffic between objects will be carried in a wireless
tant feature from the IoT perspective. Nevertheless, way. Otherwise the reduction in terms of size, weight,
some limiting factors stands in front of a widespread energy consumption, and cost of the radio can lead
adoption: Energy management of the futur embed- us to a new era where radios could be integrated in
ded devices is a crucial issue, in order to get minimal almost all objects and thus, add the world anything

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 Figure 3: RFID tag and reader

to the Anytime, anywhere, anymedia vision.

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) and radio- Figure 4: Wireless Sensor Network
frequency identification (RFID) are considered as the
two building blocks of the sensing and communication
technologies in the futur IoT: readers have their own battery supply and can in-
stantiate the communication. Obviously the radio
3.1.1 RFID coverage is the highest for active tags, though, this is
achieved at the expenses of higher production costs
RFID technology is a major breakthrough in the em- . Of the several applications, the main application of
bedded communication paradigm which enables de- active RFID tags is in port containers for monitoring
sign of microchips for wireless data communication. cargo [9].
RFID tags are expected to play a key role as enabling Sensor networks will also play a crucial role in the
identification technology in IoT. They help in au- IoT. In fact, they can cooperate with RFID systems
tomatic identification of anything they are attached to better track the status of things, i.e., their loca-
to acting as an electronic barcode. From a physical tion, temperature, movements, etc. As such, they
point of view, as shown in Figure 3 ,a RFID tag is a can augment the awareness of a certain environment
small microchip attached to an antenna (that is used and, thus, act as a further bridge between physical
for both receiving the reader signal and transmitting and digital world.
the tag ID) in a package which usually is similar to
an adhesive sticker. Dimensions can be very low: Hi-
tachi has developed a tag with dimensions 0.4 mm x 3.1.2 WSN
0.4 mm x 0.15 mm.
Sensor networks consist of a certain number, which
can be very high, of sensing nodes communicating in
The passive RFID tags are not battery powered a wireless multi-hop fashion [7] as shown in Figure 4.
and they use the power of the readers interrogation Usually nodes report the results of their sensing to
signal to communicate the ID to the RFID reader. a small number (in most cases, only one) of special
This has resulted in many applications particularly nodes called sinks. A large scientific literature has
in retail and supply chain management. The appli- been produced on sensor networks in the recent past,
cations can be found in transportation (replacement addressing several problems at all layers of the proto-
of tickets, registration stickers) and access control ap- col stack. Design objectives of the proposed solutions
plications as well. The passive tags are currently be- are energy efficiency (which is the scarcest resource
ing used in many bank cards and road toll tags which in most of the scenarios involving sensor networks),
is among the first global deployments. Active RFID scalability (the number of nodes can be very high),

5
reliability (the network may be used to report ur-
gent alarm events), and robustness (sensor nodes are
likely to be subject to failures for several reasons).
Today, most of commercial wireless sensor network
solutions are based on the IEEE 802.15.4 standard,
which defines the physical and MAC layers for low-
power, low bit rate communications in wireless per-
sonal area networks (WPAN). IEEE 802.15.4 does
not include specifications on the higher layers of the
protocol stack, which is necessary for the seamless
integration of sensor nodes into the Internet.

Integration of sensing technologies into passive

RFID tags would enable a lot of completely new ap-
plications into the IoT context. Sensing RFID sys-
tems will allow to build RFID sensor networks, which
Figure 5: IoT middleware architecture
consist of small, RFID-based sensing and computing
devices, and RFID readers, which are the sinks of the
data generated by the sensing RFID tags and provide for service composition. Figure 5 addresses the mid-
the power for the network operation. dleware issues with a complete and integrated archi-
tectural approach. Each layer is briefly presented:
3.2 Middleware
The middleware is a software layer or a set of sub- Applications: Applications are on the top of the
layers interposed between the technological and the architecture, exporting all the systems functionalities
application level. Its main feature of hiding the de- to the final user. the integration between distributed
tails of different technologies is fundamental to keep systems and applications is ensured through the
the programmer away from issues that are not di- use of standard web service protocols and service
rectly pertinent to her/his focus, which is the devel- composition technologies.
opment of the specific application enabled by the IoT
infrastructures. The middleware is gaining more and Service composition: This is a common layer on
more importance in the last years due to its major top of a SOA-based middleware architecture. It
role in simplifying the development of new services provides the functionalities for the composition of
and the integration of legacy technologies into new single services offered by networked objects to build
ones. This spares the programmer from the exact specific applications. On this layer there is no no-
knowledge of the heterogeneous set of technologies tion of devices and the only visible assets are services.
adopted by the lower layers[10].
Service management: This layer provides the
As far as frameworks for developing IoT applica- main functions that are expected to be available for
tions are concerned, a major role is expected to be each object and that allow for their management in
played by approaches based on service-oriented com- the IoT scenario. This layer might enable the remote
puting(SOC). SOC proposes a possibly distributed deployment of new services during run-time, in order
architecture, whereby entities are treated in a uni- to satisfy application needs. A service repository
form way and accessed via standard interfaces pro- is built at this layer so as to know which is the
viding a common set of services and an environment catalogue of services that are associated to each

6
object in the network. the ubiquitous computing concept, loosely defined as
the embedding of computational devices into the en-
Object abstraction: The IoT relies on a vast vironment [4].
and heterogeneous set of objects, each one providing
specific functions accessible through its own dialect. AmI shares with IoT a number of aspects. This
There is thus the need for an abstraction layer capa- comprises the inclusion in the system of sens-
ble of harmonizing the access to the different devices ing/computing capabilities embedded in the envi-
with a common language and procedure. ronment. Nevertheless, AmI applications have been
A service-oriented architecture (SOA) is mainly a mainly developed for closed environments (e.g., a
collection of services, which communicate with each room, a building), whereby a number of specific func-
other via a set of standardized interaction patterns. tions, known at design time, can be accommodated
The communication can involve either simple mes- and supported. Accordingly, one of the main fo-
sage passing or it could involve two or more ser- cus of research in AmI has been the development of
vices coordinating some activity via appropriate pro- reasoning techniques for inferring activities of users
tocols. Currently, many SOC deployments make use and proposing appropriate response strategies from
of Web-based protocols (e.g., http) for supporting the embedded devices. IoT expands the AmI con-
interoperability across administrative domains and cepts to integrate open scenarios, whereby new func-
enabling technologies. SOC can be used to man- tions/capabilities/ services need to be accommodated
age web services and make them act like a virtual at run-time without them having been necessarily
network, adapting applications to the specific users considered at design time. This requires IoT solu-
needs. Service-oriented architectures support a given tions to be inherently autonomic, i.e., presenting the
level of heterogeneity and flexibility in the software self-configuration and self-organization, possibly cog-
modules, nevertheless, to be deployed and executed, nitive, capabilities needed to provide this additional
SOC/SOA in general and Web services in particu- degree of flexibility.
lar, cannot be straightforwardly applied to the con-
struction of IoT applications. In particular, such ap-
proaches, at least in their current form, may prove IoT application scenarios require applications to
too heavyweight for being deployed on resources- prove adaptable to highly diverse contexts, with dif-
constrained devices. Nonetheless, they represent a ferent resources available and possibly deployment
very powerful approach in terms of abstracting func- environments changing over time. A number of ap-
tionality from the specific software implementation proaches have been proposed to overcome devices
as well as for ensuring integration and compatibility heterogeneity in related scenarios. All the efforts re-
of IoT technologies into the bigger Future Internet- quired in terms of development of IoT architectures,
Future Web perspective[2]. methods for management of resources, distributed
communication and computation, represent the base-
line for the introduction of innovative services that
3.3 Ambient intelligence and self will improve user’s experience.
management systems
A parralel can be established between IoT and am- IoT services will be responsive in nature, being able
bient intelligence, as a matter of fact, IoT shares a to anticipate user needs, according to the situation
number of characteristics with ambient intelligence. they are in, by means of dynamic resource manage-
In Ambient Intelligence (AmI), environments rich ment schemes and on-the-fly composition of different
in sensing/computing/actuation capabilities are de- service components. This requires applications to be
signed so to respond in an intelligent way to the pres- able to understand the context and situation the user
ence of users, thereby supporting them in carrying is in. Such a theme has been addressed within the
out specific tasks. Ambient intelligence builds upon ambient intelligence, ambient assisted living and per-

7
vasive computing fields, leading to a number of solu-
tions able to leverage contextual information coming
from a number of sources.

Services in IoT are expected to be able to seam-

lessly adapt to different situations and contexts. A
number of research efforts for building self-adaptive
situated services have been undertaken in the last few
years [11]. However, we are still far from reaching a
global understanding of how to develop self-adaptive
services presenting the flexibility level required by
IoT scenarios. Most of the approaches proposed have
been conceived to be applied to a single, well-defined
specific application field. What is needed to foster
the deployment of IoT applications is instead a set Figure 6: Applications domains and relevant major
of design patterns that can be used to augment end- scenarios
user applications with self-adaptive properties. This
requires methods for discovering, deploying and com-
posing services at run-time in a distributed fashion, 4.1 Personal and social
supporting autonomicity within all phases of the ser- In this domain, the sensor information collected is
vice life-cycle. While smart objects may be able to used only by the individuals who directly own the
run some limited and lightweight services, one key network. Usually WiFi is used as the backbone en-
aspect of IoT is the integration with the Internet in- abling higher bandwidth data (video) transfer as well
frastructure, i.e., the cloud. This may take the form as higher sampling rates (Sound). Ubiquitous health-
of appropriate Web-based services and applications, care has been envisioned for the past two decades.
able to leverage data and/or atomic services made IoT gives a perfect platform to realize this vision us-
available by smart things to provide value-added ser- ing body area sensors and IoT backend to upload
vices to the end user. the data to servers. For instance, a Smartphone can
be used for communication along with several inter-
faces like Bluetooth for interfacing sensors measuring
4 Applications physiological parameters. So far, there are several
Enabling the objects in our everyday working or liv- applications available for Apple iOS, Google Android
ing environment to possibly communicate with each and Windows Phone operating system that measure
other and elaborate the information collected will various parameters.
make a lot of applications possible.
As shown in figure 6 ,there are several application An extension of the personal body area network
domains which will be impacted by the emerging In- is creating a home monitoring system for aged-care,
ternet of Things. IoT technologies, which are either which allows the doctor to monitor patients and el-
directly applicable or closer to our current living habi- derly in their homes thereby reducing hospitalization
tudes, might be classified into the following domains: costs through early intervention and treatment. Con-
Personal and social, Business environement, Service trol of home equipment such as air conditioners, re-
and utility monitoring and Mobility and transporta- frigerators, washing machines etc., will allow better
tion based on the type of network availability, cover- home and energy management. This will see con-
age, scale, heterogeneity, repeatability, user involve- sumers become involved in IoT revolution in the same
ment and impact. manner as the Internet revolution itself.

8
 Social networking is set to undergo another trans- As a result of applications, the reaction time of tra-
formation with billions of interconnected objects. An ditional enterprises is 120 days from orders of cus-
interesting development will be using a Twitter like tomers to the supply of commodities while Wal-Mart
concept where Things in the house can periodically applying these technologies only needs few days and
tweet the readings which can be easily followed from can basically work with zero safety stock [3].
anywhere creating a TweetOT. Although this pro-
vides a common framework using cloud for informa-
tion access, a new security paradigm will be required
4.3 Service and utiliy monitoring
for this to be fully realized [9]. The information from the networks in this application
domain are usually for service optimisation rather
4.2 Business environement than consumer consumption. It is already being used
by utility companies (smart meter by electricity sup-
We refer to the Network of Things within a work en- ply companies) for resource management in order to
vironment as an enterprise based application. Infor- optimise cost vs. profit. These are made up of very
mation collected from such networks are used only by extensive networks (usually laid out by large organi-
the owners and the data may be released selectively. sation on regional and national scale) for monitoring
Environmental monitoring is the first common appli- critical utilities and efficient resource management.
cation which is implemented to keep a track of the The backbone network used can vary between cellu-
number of occupants and manage the utilities within lar, WiFi and satellite communication.
the building.
Smart grid and smart metering is another po-
Sensors have always been an integral part of factory tential IoT application which is being implemented
setup for security, automation, climate control, etc. around the world. Efficient energy consumption can
This will eventually be replaced by wireless system be achieved by continuously monitoring every elec-
giving the flexibility to make changes to the setup tricity point within a house and using this informa-
whenever required. This is nothing but an IoT subnet tion to modify the way electricity is consumed. This
dedicated to factory maintenance. information at the city scale is used for maintaining
the load balance within the grid ensuring high quality
Real-time information processing technology based of service. Video based IoT which integrates image
on RFID and NFC (Near Field Communication) will processing, computer vision and networking frame-
be widely used in supply chain, due to their low works will help develop a new challenging scientific
cost and low requirement. Accordingly, accurate and research area at the intersection of video, infrared,
real-time information relating to inventory of finished microphone and network technologies. Surveillance,
goods, work-in-progress, and in-transit stages with the most widely used camera network applications,
reliable due dates would be obtained. As a result, helps track targets, identify suspicious activities, de-
the demand forecast would be more accurate and ex- tect left luggages and monitor unauthorized access.
tra buffers would be unnecessary. Automatic behavior analysis and event detection (as
part of sophisticated video analytics) is in its infancy
For example, a manufacturer of soft drinks can and breakthroughs are expected in the next decade
identify with the click of a button how many contain- [9].
ers of its soda cans are likely to reach their expiration
date in the next few days and where they are located Disaster alerting and recovery systems could be sig-
at various grocery outlets. Using this information, it nificantly enhanced. Natural disasters (flood, land-
might modify its future production and distribution slide, forest fire, etc.) and accidental disasters (coal
plans, possibly resulting in significant cost savings. mine accident, etc.) are taking place more and more

9
frequently. Technologies in IoT, such like RFID and congestion directly imposes significant costs on eco-
WSN could play a crucial role in disaster alerting be- nomic and social activities in most cities. Supply
fore it happens, and disaster recovery after it ends. In chain efficiencies and productivity, including just-in-
order to lessen the effects of natural disasters such like time operations, are severely impacted by this con-
flood, landslide or forest fire, it is necessary to antic- gestion causing freight delays and delivery sched-
ipate its occurrence and to alert in time. The timely ule failures. Dynamic traffic information will af-
access to relevant information on hazardous environ- fect freight movement, allow better planning and im-
mental conditions gives residents in the nearing area proved scheduling. [9]
time to apply preparedness procedures, alleviating
the damage and reducing the number of casualties Cars, buses and taxis as well as roads intersections
derived from the event. WSN enables the acquisi- are becoming more instrumented with sensors, actu-
tion, processing and transmission of environmental ators, and processing power. Important information
data from the location where disasters originate to could be collected to realize traffic control and guid-
potentially threatened cities. Then this information ance, help in the management of the depots, and pro-
could be used for authorities to rapidly assess criti- vide tourists with appropriate transportation infor-
cal situations and to organize resources. As to acci- mation. One of the successful applications of IoT in
dent disaster recovery, for example, after a coal mine transportation is the Traffic Information Grid (TIG)
accident occurs, instant tracking and positioning of implemented on ShanghaiGrid.
trapped workers using RFID technologies could pro-
vide timely rescue and lessen casualties and economic TIG shields all the complexities in information col-
loss to the largest extent. Knowing trapped workers lection, storage, aggregation and analysis. It uti-
geographic distribution and comparatively accurate lizes Grid technology to ingrate traffic information
position, the rescue action would be more targeting collected by sensors and actuators, share traffic data
thus is time-efficient [3]. and traffic resources, provide better traffic services to
traffic participators, and help to remove traffic bot-
Water network monitoring and quality assurance of tlenecks and resolve traffic problems. The TIG por-
drinking water is another critical application that is tal provides users with various information services
being addressed using IoT. Sensors measuring critical and can be accessed by Web browsers, mobile phones,
water parameters are installed at important locations PDAs and other public infrastructure. Services pro-
in order to ensure high supply quality. This avoids vided in TIG included road status information, least-
accidental contamination among storm water drains, time travel scheme selection, leastcost travel scheme
drinking water and sewage disposal. The same net- selection, map operation and information query [3].
work can be extended to monitor irrigation in agri-
cultural land. The network is also extended for moni- Apart from the above applications, many others
toring soil parameters which allows informed decision could be described as futuristic since they rely on
making about agriculture. some (communications, sensing, material and indus-
trial processes) technologies that are still to come or
whose implementation is still too complex. The most
4.4 Mobility and transportation appealing futuristic applications included robot taxi,
city information model and enhanced game room.
Smart transportation and smart logistics are placed
in a separate domain due to the nature of data shar-
ing and backbone implementation required. Urban 5 Research challenges
traffic is the main contributor to traffic noise pol-
lution and a major contributor to urban air quality In spite of the partial feasability of the IoT concept
degradation and greenhouse gas emissions. Traffic thanks to the advances realized in the enabled tech-

10
 5.1.1 Data confidentiality
Data confidentiality represents a major issue in IoT
visions, making sure that only authorized entities can
acces and modify data. This is particularly relevant
in the business context, whereby, data may represent
a valuable asset that has to be protected. Two im-
portant aspects have to be taken in consideration,
first the definition of an access control mechansim
and second the definition of an object authentication
process.

As data in IoT applications will be related to

the physical realm, ensuring data confidentiality is a
main constraint for many uses cases. For instance: a
smart community application where a group of homes
(located in a close geographic area) are connected
and exchange data might rise privacy concerns [17].
In such a context, data should be accessible only by
the appropriate users (home owners for instance), the
Figure 7: Security research challenges in IoT
leakage of private data into the public sphere com-
prise in a serious way the user’s privacy.

nologies (seen in section 3), a large effort is still re- Usual solutions for ensuring data confidentiality
quired from the research community in order to guar- may not be straightforwardly applied to IoT con-
antee a full, functional and safe deployement of IoT text due to scalability issues generated by the sheer
in our every day life. In this section we propose a amount of data in the IoT network. Optimal cryp-
brief description of the main open issues. tography algorithms and adequat key management
systems, as well as security protocols that connect
all the devices through the Internet form the cor-
nerstone data confidentiality. Although it is possible
5.1 Security management and privacy to implement existing standards (AES for instance),
some IoT devices such as passive RFID tags, might
be extremly constrained. Cryptography mechanisms
In the Internet of Things, everything real becomes must be smaller and faster but with little or no re-
virtual, which means that each person ans thing has a duction in security level. Mechanisms could include
localizable, addressable, and readable countrepart on symmetric algorihthms, hash functions and random
the internet. The IoT promises to extend (anywhere, number generators [15].
anyhow, anytime) computing to (anything, anyone,
any service). IoT is unlikely to fullfill a widespread
5.1.2 Privacy protection
diffusion until it provides stong security foundations
which will prevent the growth of malicious models or According to [2], privacy defines the rules under
at least, mitigate their impact. As shown in Figure which data referring to individual users may be ac-
7, there are a number of top level security research cessed. Privacy is one of the most sensitive subject
challenges, some of them are described in this section: in any discussion of IoT security. The data avail-
ability explosion has fostered some entities to pro-

11
file and track users without their consent. The IoT’s Governance helps strengthen trust in the IoT. A
anywhere, anything anytime nature could easily turn common framework for security policies will support
such practices into a dystopia. Facebook accounts interoperability and reduce liability. If someone can
already affect a user’s employability and personal in- attribute a malicious action transaction to a par-
teractions, IoT could certainly raise much more con- ticular user or agent, it will be possible to punish
cerns regarding to the huge amount of personal data that user or the agent’s owner. But governance is a
available. double-edge sword. On the one hand, it offers stabil-
ity, support for political decisions, and a fair enforce-
ment mechanism. On the other hand, governance can
Different approches are in development to protect easily become excessive, fostering an environment in
the personal information of IoT users. The delega- which people are continuously monitored and con-
tion mechanism is one privacy preservation proposal. trolled. Addressing the challenges of a governance
An unauthorized RFID reader will retrieve only a framework when countless stakeholders and billions
random value, so it will not be able to track the of objects are connected requires the combined efforts
user. However, limiting access to the user is not the of several research communities[15].
only protection scenario. In some cases, users will
want to provide information without revealing too 5.1.4 Fault tolerance
much about themselves. Some solutions in this con-
text let the user find others who best match his pref- Clearly, the IoT will be more susceptible to attack
erences, without actually revealing such preferences than the current Internet, since billions more devices
[15]. For instance, a user can try to locate someone in will be producing and consuming services. Highly
the neighborhood who like a particular type of music constrained devices will be the most vulnerable, and
without providing his own location and music prefer- malicious entities will seek to control at least some
ences. devices either directly or indirectly. In this context,
fault tolerance is indispensable to assure service re-
liability, but any solution must be specialized and
5.1.3 Trust and governance lightweight to account for the number of constrained
and easily accessible IoT devices. Achieving fault
There is no consensual defintion of the concept of
tolerance in the IoT will require three cooperative
trust, nevertheless, it is a wide used concept in dif-
efforts. The first is to make all objects secure by
ferent context related to computer science’s security.
default. Researchers must work on designing secure
A widely used definition is the one provided by Blaze
protocols and mechanisms, since it might be very
and Feigenbaum [14], which refers to security policies
costly to provide an update for billions of deployed,
regulating accesses to resources and credentials that
heteregenoues and interconnected devices.
are required to satisfy such policies.
The second effort is to give all IoT objects the
In the IoT context, trust mechansims have to be ability to know the state of the network and its ser-
able to define trust in a dynamic, collaborative en- vices. This system would need to give feedback to
vironement and provide trust throught an interac- many other elements; for example, a watchdog sys-
tion. Another vision of trust encompasses how users tem could acquire data as part of supplying qualita-
feel while interacting in the IoT. Feelings of help- tive and quantitative security metrics. An important
lessness and being under some unknown control can task in this second effort is to build an accountability
greatly hinder the deployement of IoT-based appli- system that will help monitor state.
cations and services. Users must be able to control
their own services, in another word, there must be Finally, objects should be able to defend them-
support for controlling the state of the virtual world. selves against network failures and attacks. All pro-

12
tocols should incorporate mechanisms that respond Identification: The function of identification is to
to abnormal situations and allow the object to grace- map a unique identifier or UID (globally unique or
fully degrade its service. Objects should be able to unique within a particular scope), to an entity so
use intrusion-detection systems and other defensive as to make it without ambiguity identifiable and re-
mechanisms to ward off attackers. Once an attack af- trievable. According to [2], the identification process
fects their services, IoT elements should be able to act
could be done basically in two ways. The fist one is to
quickly to recover from any damage. Such elements physically tag one object by means of RFIDs (or sim-
can use feedback from other mechanisms and IoT en- ilar). In such a way, an object can be read by means
tities to map the location of unsafe zones, where an of an appropriate device, returning an identifier that
attack has caused service outages. can be looked up in a database for retrieving the set
of features associating to it. The second possibility
The IoT is already more than a concept. By com- is to provide one object with its own description, it
plying with security requirements, it can fully bloom will be directly communicated through wireless con-
into a paradigm that will improve many aspects of nection. These two approches can complement each
daily life. Open problems remain in many areas of other. RFID-based identification is cheaper in term
the security view, such as cryptographic mechanisms, of the electronics to be embedded in the objects, but
network protocols, data and identity management, requires a database access where information about
user privacy, selfmanagement, and trusted architec- an object is stored. The self-description based ap-
tures [15]. proach, on the contrary, relaxes the requirements to
access to a global database, but still requires to em-
bed more electronics into everyday objects.
5.2 Identity management and com-
munication issues
The diversity of identities, types and relationships Authentication: Authentication is the prossess of
configurations requires a judicious identity manage- proving identity, it is an important part of identity
ment, according to certain object identity principles management, objects will have to handle different be-
shown in the following exemple: haviour according to it. A house could have sev-
eral appliances that only certain residents and vis-
- An objects identity is not the same as the iden- itors can use at particular times. The refrigerator
tity of its underlying mechanisms. The x-ray ma- could lock itself after midnight to any resident or vis-
chine in the radiology department might have an iting teenagers, but remain open for the adults. A
IP address, but it should also have its own iden- promising approach is diverse authentication meth-
tity to distinguish it from other machines. ods for humans and machines. A user could open an
office door using bioidentification (such as a finger-
- An object can have one core identity and several print) or an object within a personal network, such
temporary identities. A hospital can become a as a passport, identity card, or smartphone. Com-
meeting place for a health conference or a shelter bining authentication methods can prevent any loss
after a fire. of overall system security. Such combinations typi-
- An object can identify itself using its identity cally take the form of what I am + what I know or
or its specific features. A virtual food identifies what I have + what I know [15]. Because the IoT
itself by its ingredients and quantity. deals with multiple contexts, an entity is not likely
to reveal its identity all the time. For example, in a
- Objects know the identity of their owners. The vehicular network, a police car can reveal its identity
device that controls a user’s glucose level should to cars and staff at the police station, but keep its
know how that information fits in that users identity hidden during undercover work unless it is
overall health. interacting with other police cars.

13
 Authorization: Authorization is also an identity 5.3 Ubiquitous intelligence
management concern. Authentication and authoriza-
The Internet of Things will create a dynamic net-
tion share open research issues, such as finding a
work of billions or trillions of wireless identifiable
balance between centralized and distributed systems
(things) communicating with one another and inte-
to answer the question of who is in charge of defin-
grating the developments from concepts like Perva-
ing and publishing roles. However, specific topics,
sive Computing, Ubiquitous Computing and Ambi-
such as delegation, fall mainly under the authoriza-
ent Intelligence. Internet of Things hosts the vision
tion umbrella. An IoT element can delegate certain
of ubiquitous computing and ambient intelligence en-
tasks to other objects for a limited time. For exam-
hancing them by requiring a full communication and
ple, an object in the users personal network, such
a complete computing capability among things and
as his phone, can check on his behalf to see if his
integrating the elements of continuous communica-
suitcase contains all the clothes needed for an up-
tion, identification and interaction. The Internet of
coming conference. The services, an object provides,
Things fuses the digital world and the physical world
might depend on the number of credentials presented.
by bringing different concepts and technical compo-
For example, a classroom could provide anyone who
nents together: pervasive networks, miniaturization
asks with the name of the course being taught, but it
of devices, mobile communication, and new models
would release the syllabus of that course only to stu-
for business processes.
dents with authorization certificates from the dean.

IoT scenarios will be typically characterized by

huge amounts of data made available. A challeng-
ing task is to interpret such data and reason about
it. This underpins the need to have an actionable
The futur deployement of IoT requires the de- representation of IoT data and data streams. This
velopement of advanced techniques able to embed represents a key issue in order to achieve re-usability
communication capabilities into every-day objects. of components and services, together with interoper-
In the last years, researches have been led on abilty among IoT solutions. Advances in data min-
low-cost, low-power consumption and micro/nanpo- ing and knowledge representation/management will
electronics. Low-power communications is a well- also be required, to satisfactorily address the pecu-
established research field within the sensor network- liar features of IoT technologies. A related research
ing community. The typical approach pursued in field is that of distributed artificial intelligence, which
such works relates to the match of the RF front-end addresses how autonomous software entities, usually
activation patterns (i.e., sleep periods) to the traf- referred to as (agents), can be made able to interact
fic pattern. The use of such protocols, however at with the environment and among themselves in such
present, does not provide a final answer to the op- a way to effectively pursue a given global goal[6].
timization of energy consumption versus scalability
issues. These are of paramount importance for IoT IoT may well inherit concepts and lessons learned
scenarios, as battery replacement is a costly process in pervasive computing, ambient intelligence applica-
to be avoided as much as possible, especially for large tions and service-oriented computing. Researchers
scale deployments. Furthermore, the basic idea of working in the field of human-computer interfaces
such protocols is to perform active/sleep duty cycles and user-centric design methodologies, in particular,
in order to save the power dispersed in idle listening. addressed already several issues concerning the im-
More recently, advances in the field of nano-scale ac- pact of sensorized and pervasive environment on the
cumulators as well as energy harvesting techniques user experience. Since IoT will take the reference sce-
appear of prominent interest to limit the need for narios one step further in terms of scale and offered
battery replacements [5]. features, it will also require the development of suit-

14
able, scalable service delivery platforms that permit 6LoWPAN is to define a set of protocols to make
multiple services to coexist. the IPv6 protocol compatible with low capacity de-
vices. Core protocols have been already speci-
fied. While ROLL recently produced the RPL (pro-
5.4 Standardisation efforts nounced ”ripple”) draft for routing over low power
and lossy networks including 6LoWPAN. Lots of con-
Although considerable efforts have been made to tributions are needed to reach a full solution [3].
standardize the IoT paradigm by scientific commu-
nities, European Standards Organizations (ETSI,
CEN, CENELEC,etc.), Standardization Institutions 5.5 Social and political issues
(ISO, ITU) and global Interest Groups and Alliances
(IETF, EPCglobal, etc.), they are not integrated in The Internet has long since changed from being a
a comprehensive framework. purely informational system to one that is socio-
technological and has a social, creative and polit-
ical dimension. But the importance of its non-
Efforts towards standardization have focused on technological aspects is becoming even more apparent
several principal areas: RFID frequency, protocols of in the development of Internet of Things, since it adds
communication between readers and tags, and data new challenges to these non-technological aspects.
formats placed on tags and labels. EPCglobal, Eu-
ropean Commission and ISO are major standardiza-
tion bodies dealing with RFID systems. EPCglobal Several critical questions need to be asked with re-
mainly aims at supporting the global adoption of a gard to possible consequences of the full IoT’s de-
EPC for each tag and related industry driven stan- ployement, much of the public debate on whether to
dards. European Commission has made coordinated accept or reject the Internet of Things involves the
efforts aiming at defining RFID technologies and sup- conventional dualisms of security versus freedom and
porting the transition from localized RFID applica- comfort versus data privacy. In this respect, the dis-
tions to the IoT. Differently from these, ISO deals cussion is not very different from the notorious al-
with how to modulate, utilize frequencies and pre- tercations concerning store cards, video surveillance
vent collision technically. and electronic passports. As with RFID, the unease
focuses mainly on personal data that is automati-
cally collected and that could be used by third parties
The European Telecommunications Standards In- without peoples agreement or knowledge for unknown
stitute (ETSI) has launched the Machine-to-Machine and potentially damaging purposes.
(M2M) Technical Committee to conduct standard-
ization activities relevant to M2M systems and de-
fine cost-effective solutions for M2M communica- Personal privacy is indeed coming under pressure.
tions. Due to lack of standardization of this leading Smart objects can accumulate a massive amount of
paradigm towards IoT, standard Internet, Cellular data, simply to serve us in the best possible way.
and Web technologies have been used for the solu- Since this typically takes place unobtrusively in the
tion of standards. Therefore, the ETSI M2M com- background, we can never be entirely sure whether
mittee aims to develop and maintain an end-to-end we are being (observed) when transactions take place.
architecture for M2M (with end-to-end IP philosophy Aside of the data protection issues, there is also the
behind it), and strengthen the standardization efforts question of who would own the masses of automati-
on M2M. Within the Internet Engineering Task Force cally captured and interpreted real-world data, which
(IETF), there are two working groups 6LoWPAN could be of significant commercial or social value, and
and ROLL dealing with integrating sensor nodes into who would be entitled to use it and within what eth-
IPv6 networks. ical and legal framework.

15
 Another critical aspect is that of dependence on cial consensus on how the new technical opportuni-
technology. In business and also in society, gener- ties should be used. This represents a substantial
ally, we have already become very dependent on the research issue for the futur.
general availability of electricity; infrequent black-
outs have fortunately not yet had any serious conse-
quences. But if everyday objects only worked prop- 6 Conclusion
erly with an Internet connection in the future, this
would lead to an even greater dependence on the un- Internet Of Things brings the possibility to connect
derlying technology. If the technology infrastructure billions of every-day’s objects to the Internet, allow-
failed for whatever reason: design faults, material ing them to interact and to share data. This prospect
defects, sabotage, overloading, natural disasters or open new doors toward a futur where the real and
crises, it could have a disastrous effect on the econ- virtual world merge seamlessly through the massive
omy and society. Even a virus programmed by some deployment of embedded devices. This survey has
high-spirited teenagers that played global havoc with aimed to provide a brief overview of the IoT’s state-
selected everyday objects and thus provoked a safety- of-art, including the main definitions and visions, en-
critical, life-threatening or even politically explosiveabling technologies, already or soon available appli-
situation could have catastrophic consequences. cations and open research issues focusing on the secu-
rity perspective. The IoT has the potential to add a
new dimension to the ICT sector by enabling commu-
The Internet of Things has now arrived in politics. nications with and among smart objects, thus leading
A study for the (Global Trends 2025) project carried to the vision of (anytime, anywhere, anymedia, any-
out by the US National Intelligence Council states thing) communications. Though a lot still to be done
that foreign manufacturers could become both the in order to fullfil the IoT vision.
single source and single point of failure for mission-
critical Internet-enabled things, warning not only of
the nation becoming critically dependent on them, References
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