Database Reference
In-Depth Information
with it. This chapter will discuss a data analytics perspective about
mining and managing data associated with this phenomenon, which is
now known as the
internet of things
.
Keywords:
The Internet of Things, Pervasive Computing, Ubiquitous Computing
1. Introduction
The internet of things [14] refers to uniquely addressable objects and
their virtual representations in an Internet-like structure. Such objects
may link to information about them, or may transmit real-time sensor
data about their state or other useful properties associated with the
object.
Radio-Frequency Identification Technology (RFID)
[23, 47, 93,
94] is generally seen as a key enabler of the internet of things, because
of its ability to track a large number of uniquely identifiable objects
with the use of
Electronic Product Codes (EPC)
. However, other kinds
of ubiquitous sensor devices, barcodes, or 2D-codes may also be used to
enable the
Internet of Things (IoT)
. The concepts of
pervasive computing
and
ubiquitous computing
are related to the internet of things, in the
sense that all of these paradigms are enabled by
large-scale embedded
sensor devices
.
The vision of the internet of things is that individual objects of ev-
eryday life such as cars, roadways, pacemakers, wirelessly connected
pill-shaped cameras in digestive tracks, smart billboards which adjust to
the passersby, refrigerators, or even cattle can be equipped with sensors,
which can track useful information about these objects. Furthermore,
if the objects are
uniquely addressable
and
connected to the internet
,
then the information about them can flow through the same protocol
that connects our computers to the internet. Since these objects can
sense the environment and communicate, they have become tools for un-
derstanding complexity, and may often enable autonomic responses to
challenging scenarios without human intervention. This broader princi-
ple is popularly used in IBM's
Smarter Planet
initiative for autonomic
computing.
Since the internet of things is built upon the ability to uniquely iden-
tify internet-connected objects, the addressable space must be large
enough to accommodate the uniquely assigned IP-addresses to the differ-
ent devices. The original internet protocol IPv4 uses 32-bit addresses,
which allows for only about 4.3 billion unique addresses. This was a
reasonable design at the time when IPv4 was proposed, since the total
