Dr. Aly, O.
Computer Science
Introduction
Internet of Things (IoT) is regarded to be “one of the most promising fuels of Big Data expansion” (De Mauro, Greco, & Grimaldi, 2015). IoT seems promising as Google acquired Nest for $3.2 billion in January 2014 (Dalton, 2016). The Nest is a smart hub producer at the forefront of the Internet of Things (Dalton, 2016). This acquiring can tell the importance of the IoT. IoT is becoming powerful because it affects our daily life and the behavior of the users (Atzori, Iera, & Morabito, 2010). The underlying concept of the IoT is the ubiquitous characteristics that using various devices such as sensors, mobile phones and so forth (Atzori et al., 2010).
As cited in (Batalla & Krawiec, 2014) “Internet of Things (IoT) is a global network infrastructure, linking physical and virtual objects through the exploitation of data capture and communication capabilities” (Batalla & Krawiec, 2014). IoT is described by (Batalla & Krawiec, 2014) as “a huge connectivity platform for self-managed objects.” IoT is increasingly growing, and the reasons for such strong growth go to the inexpensive cost of the computing including sensors and the growth of Wi-Fi (Gholap & Asole, 2016; Gubbi, Buyya, Marusic, & Palaniswami, 2013), and 4G-LTE (Gubbi et al., 2013). Other factors include the growth of mobiles, the rise of software developments, the emergence of standardized low-power wireless technologies (Gholap & Asole, 2016).
With the advancement in the Web, from static web pages in Web 1.0 to network web in Web 2.0, to ubiquitous computing web in Web 3.0, the increased requirement for “data-on-demand” using complex, and intuitive queries becomes significant (Gubbi et al., 2013). With IoT, many objects and many things surrounding people will be on the network (Gubbi et al., 2013). The Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) and the technologies of the sensor network emerge to respond to the IoT network challenges where information and communication systems are embedded in the environment around us invisibly (Gubbi et al., 2013). The computing criterion for the IoT will go beyond the traditional scenarios of the mobile computing which utilize the smartphones and portables (Gubbi et al., 2013). IoT will evolve to connect existing everyday objects and embed intelligence into our environment (Gubbi et al., 2013).
Performance Bottleneck
The elements of IoT include the RFID, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), Addressing Schemes, Data Storage and Analytics, and Visualization (Gubbi et al., 2013). IoT will require the persistence of the network to channel the traffic of the data ubiquitously. IoT confronts a bottleneck at the interface between the gateway and wireless sensor devices (Gubbi et al., 2013). The bottleneck at the interface is between the Internet and smart object networks of the RFID or WSN subnets (Jin, Gubbi, Marusic, & Palaniswami, 2014). Moreover, the scalability of the address of the device of the existing network must be sustainable (Gubbi et al., 2013). The performance of the network or the device functioning should not be affected by adding networks and devices (Gubbi et al., 2013; Jin et al., 2014). The Uniform Resource Name (URN) system will play a significant role in the development of IoT to overcome these issues (Gubbi et al., 2013).
Moreover, although Cloud can enhance and simplify the communication of IoT, the Cloud can still represent a bottleneck in certain scenarios (Botta, de Donato, Persico, & Pescapé, 2016). As indicated in (Gubbi et al., 2013), the high capacity and large-scale web data generated by IoT and as IoT grows, the Cloud becomes a bottleneck (Gubbi et al., 2013). A framework proposed by (Gubbi et al., 2013) to enable scalability of the cloud to provide the capacity that is required for IoT. While the proposed framework of (Gubbi et al., 2013) enables the separation of the networking, computation, storage and visualization theme, it allows the independent growth in each domain, at the same time enhance each other in an environment that is shared among them (Gubbi et al., 2013).
IoT New Challenges
IoT faces additional challenges such as Addressing and Networking Issues (Atzori et al., 2010). The investigation effort has been exerted about the integration of RFID tags into IPv6. Mobile IP is proposed as a solution for the mobility in IoT scenarios (Atzori et al., 2010). Moreover, the DNS (domain name servers), which provide IP address of a host from a certain input name, does not seem to serve the IoT scenarios where communications are among objects and not hosts. Object Name Service (ONS) is proposed as a solution to the DNS issue (Atzori et al., 2010). ONS will associate a reference to a description of the object and the related RFID tag identifier, and it must work in a bidirectional manner (Atzori et al., 2010). For the complex operation of IoT, the Object Code Mapping Service (OCMS) is still an open issue (Atzori et al., 2010). TCP as the Transmission Control Protocol is found inadequate and inefficient for the transmission control of end-to-end in the IoT (Atzori et al., 2010). The TCP issue is still an open issue for IoT (Atzori et al., 2010). Other issues of IoT include Quality of Service, Security, and Privacy.
In conclusion, IoT is a promising domain that will change how we communicate and how we live our everyday life. There are still major issues such as the bottleneck when dealing with large-scale of data, addressing and network issues such as DNS, and TCP. Various efforts are exerted in the research field and industry to address these issues. However, there are still open issues that are under investigation, which place the IoT in the “work in progress” status, and it is not fully matured.
References
Atzori, L., Iera, A., & Morabito, G. (2010). The internet of things: A survey. Computer networks, 54(15), 2787-2805.
Batalla, J. M., & Krawiec, P. (2014). Conception of ID layer performance at the network level for Internet of Things. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 18(2), 465-480.
Botta, A., de Donato, W., Persico, V., & Pescapé, A. (2016). Integration of Cloud Computing and Internet Of Things: a Survey. Future Generation computer systems, 56, 684-700.
Dalton, C. (2016). Brilliant Strategy for Business: How to plan, implement and evaluate strategy at any level of management: Pearson UK.
De Mauro, A., Greco, M., & Grimaldi, M. (2015). What is big data? A consensual definition and a review of key research topics. Paper presented at the AIP Conference Proceedings.
Gholap, K. K., & Asole, S. (2016). Today’s Impact of Big Data on Cloud. International Journal of Engineering Science, 3748.
Gubbi, J., Buyya, R., Marusic, S., & Palaniswami, M. (2013). Internet of Things (IoT): A vision, architectural elements, and future directions. Future Generation computer systems, 29(7), 1645-1660.
Jin, J., Gubbi, J., Marusic, S., & Palaniswami, M. (2014). An information framework for creating a smart city through internet of things. IEEE Internet of Things Journal, 1(2), 112-121.
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