The Internet of Things: The Story So Far

Payam Barnaghi and Amit Sheth

September 9, 2014

The combination of embedded technologies, wired and wireless communications and low cost sensing
devices on the Internet make up the Internet of Things (IoT). With an expected 50 billion connected
things by 2020, this has created huge interest. Predating the current situation in the IoT were RFID
technologies for identifying real world objects, (wireless) sensor and actuator networks.
The most recent progress in IoT has resulted from industry and consumer market interest in
connected sensing devices. Several products have been introduced for sports and activity monitoring,
personal health monitoring (and the associated Quantified Self movement) and other consumer and
retail markets. There is also a new trend of Internet and mobile software and services for monitoring
and controlling personal devices and home appliances. However, these products rely on vertical and
proprietary solutions that have limited interoperability with other devices and services.
Heterogeneous data and services
The IoT is evolving as a distributed, multi-vendor and multi-platform framework with heterogeneity at
device, network, data and services levels. In the past few years there has been significant progress in
standardising wireless communication technologies and providing efficient solutions for low power,
resource-constrained IoT devices. The IETF Core standards and IPv6 over Low power Wireless
Personal Area Networks (6LowPAN) and Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) [1] are examples of
these efforts. IoT data communication is becoming an integrated part of mobile communications and
future generations of mobile communications and 5G networks are now being designed to support
voice, text and multimedia data and also machine-to-machine communications and connection and
control for IoT devices with constrained resources and intermittent data patterns. These standards and
systems are increasingly being deployed in public and private sectors.
IoT research and development is now moving from infrastructure and baseline technology
development, or early adoption of standalone solutions, towards the standardisation of solutions and
the definition of common components and practices. However, heterogeneity at the semantic level still
remains a key issue. To enable effective and automated data and service communication and
interactions, data and services should be defined in common and interoperable formats. While the
introduction of TCP/IP on Internet and HTTP protocols paved the way for the rapid growth of the Web
and markup languages such as HTML allowed the publication of millions of pages on the Web, IoT
needs its own specific or adapted and extended higher-level protocols and common formats to enable
interoperability between various heterogeneous data and services. Several efforts in this area, such as
the W3C Semantic Sensor Network Ontology (SSNO) [2] and HyperCat [3], have been introduced and
SSNO has seen quite a few demonstrations and early adoption. However, these models need to be
adapted and exploited by more products and services. There is also a need for software and
development APIs to allow publishing, sharing and access based on common formats. Linking IoT data
to other data on the Web and providing linked IoT data forms will also enhance the use and
exploitation of the data and services. Access interfaces, query and discovery methods similar to those
offered for the Internet and Web resources should be also provided in order for the IoT domain to
make data and services widely accessible beyond internal IoT networks.
Actionable knowledge
The IoT is not about collecting and publishing data from the physical world but rather about providing
knowledge and insights regarding objects (i.e., things), the physical environment, the human and

social activities in the physical environments (as may be recorded by devices), and enabling systems
to take action based on the knowledge obtained. In other words, raw IoT data is not what the IoT user
wants; it is mainly about ambient intelligence and actionable knowledge enabled by real
world and real time data [4]. Figure 1 shows the different waves of IoT development. As discussed
above, it started with the RFID developments and is now mainly focused on physical-cyber-social data
and integrated systems with various products and services and prototype models for data/service
interoperability.

Figure 1. Different waves of IoT development

The IoT has become an integral part of many industry R&D units in large industries and there are
growing numbers of start-ups and SMEs that focus their business models on IoT technologies. Some
public sector areas have also taken a keen interest in using IoT technologies to provide better
community services, healthcare, transport and environmental control and monitoring, among other
applications. Several cities around the world now have plans to develop, or have already developed
and exploited, IoT-based solutions in their smart city frameworks. Wearable technologies and
smartphone and smart devices are driving the rapid growth and adaptation of IoT products and
services in the consumer market. Industry solutions based on IoT are emerging, with some early
adaptors in transportation, logistics and health. The IoT is already around us. It is not one solution or
a unified technology; it involves several domains, various technologies and different coordinated and
uncoordinated efforts to connect and exploit the Things data.

Future developments in the IoT domain are going to have a stronger focus on data and on extracting
actionable knowledge and providing value-added services. This will depend on developing efficient and
interoperable solutions across different platforms and various networks, and enabling semantic
interoperability among various resources, data and services. Cloud-based back end services for the
efficient integration, aggregation, interpretation and information extraction of multi-modal IoT data
are crucial for future developments in the IoT domain. IoT data can be unreliable, incomplete and
could have various qualities. The data is often time and location dependent and processing methods
should be able to process and extract information from various multi-modal and real time streams and
often in a (near) real time manner. This will require more adaptable and dynamic analytics solutions
than the classic data mining and data analysis solutions.
Let us not forget that IoT enables the collection and dissemination of data from public and personal
environments. So security, privacy and trust will always be core issues and considerations in many IoT
applications and services. Industry will need service level agreements and new business models. The
growing trend of social media and crowdsourcing has also enabled the concept of human sensors or
Citizen Sensing in which people use smart devices and social tools to report their observations and
measurements from the physical world. Discovering, integrating and interpreting these various multimodal physical-cyber-social streams, providing timely and sufficiently accurate and reliable insights
and actionable knowledge from the data are among the key challenges. IoT solutions should consider
resource and network characteristics and limitations (e.g., energy efficiency, latency), quality issues
(e.g., quality of information and quality of services), and should provide global, scalable solutions that
go beyond the vertical networks and offer reliable and dependable services and applications for both
consumer and industry markets. Future IoT technologies need to be able to translate the deluge of
dynamic and heterogeneous data from the large number of connected devices into situational
awareness, actionable information and better decisions leading to improved productivity and better
quality of life.
Acknowledgement
The authors are funded in part by the EU FP7 CityPulse project (Contract Number: CNECT-ICT609035).
References
[1] Bormann, C.; Castellani, AP.; Shelby, Z., "CoAP: An Application Protocol for Billions of Tiny
Internet Nodes," Internet Computing, IEEE, vol.16, no.2, pp.62-67, March-April 2012
[2] Compton; M., et al., "The SSN ontology of the W3C semantic sensor network incubator group",
Journal of Web Semantics, 17, Dec. 2012
[3] HyperCat, available at: http://wiki.1248.io/doku.php?id=hypercat
[4] Barnaghi, P.; Sheth, A; Henson, C., "From Data to Actionable Knowledge: Big Data Challenges in
the Web of Things," Intelligent Systems, IEEE, vol.28, no.6, pp.6-11, Nov/Dec. 2013

Payam Barnaghi is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) at the Institute for

Communication Systems at the University of Surrey. He is technical coordinator of the EU FP7
CityPulse project (http://ict-citypulse.eu). His research interests include machine learning, Internet of
Things, data analytics, semantic web, information centric networks, and information search and
retrieval. Barnaghi has a PhD in Computer Science from University of Malaya. He is a senior member
of IEEE.
Contact him at: p.barnaghi@surrey.ac.uk;
http://personal.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/P.Barnaghi

Amit Sheth is the LexisNexis Ohio Eminent Scholar and director of Kno.e.sis at
Wright State University. His research interests include Web 3.0 (including the Semantic Web),
semantics-empowered social Web, sensor Web, the Web of things, mobile computing, and cloud
computing. Sheth has a PhD in computer and information science from Ohio State University. He is a
fellow of IEEE.
Contact him at amit@knoesis.org; http://knoesis.org/amit