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1. Introduction
Since its introduction in the year 1999 by Kevin Ashton, IoT has turned out to be one of the most common buzzwords we come across in the research community these days. There is no standard definition as of now for the IoT because it is such an evolving field that we actually do not know what things will be covered under it in the near future. One of the most common definitions accepted widely for the Internet of Things (IoT) can be as: “Collection of ‘things’ embedded with electronics, software, sensors and actuators and connected via the internet to collect and exchange data with each other”(Yang et al., 2017). The IoT devices are equipped with sensors and processing power that enable them to be deployed in many environments. The impact of human role has been minimized in the IoT. IoT can possibly cover all the fields of research nowadays but we majorly focus on the areas of sensing, heterogeneous access, information processing, applications and services and additional components such as security and privacy. The IoT connects objects from different environments into a single large network based on the Internet Protocol and is the basis for the development of the so-called smart environments, such as smart houses, factories or even cities. The IoT can be envisioned as set of interconnected objects that allows people and things to be connected anytime, Anyplace, with Anything and Anyone, using Any path/network and Any service as shown in Figure 1 (Balte et al., 2015). The composition of IoT consists of various elements:
Everyday devices.
Smart homes and cities.
Machine-to-machine (M2M) and wireless sensor networks.
Telemedicine and Healthcare.
Embedded Mobile.
Management and automation of everyday services.
Controlling and securing the services provided.
Management of energy consumption.
IoT at times is interchangeably used with M2M (communication) systems but essentially, they are not identical, although they may largely overlap with one other. A shared characteristic of both can be remote access to devices. However, there are some essential differences between them. M2M connects “things” with a computer. M2M refers to communication between two or more devices by means of a mobile or fixed network and is vertical point-to-point communication. M2M applications consist of a hardware module embedded into a...