Computer Communications 54 (2014) 131

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Computer Communications
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/comcom

Review

The Internet of Things vision: Key features, applications and open issues
Eleonora Borgia
Institute of Informatics and Telematics (IIT), Italian National Research Council (CNR), via G. Moruzzi 1, 56124 Pisa, Italy

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Article history:
Received 12 May 2014
Received in revised form 16 September 2014
Accepted 16 September 2014
Available online 14 October 2014
Keywords:
Internet of Things (IoT)
RFIDs
Sensors
Machine-to-Machine (M2M)
communications
Standardization

a b s t r a c t
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a new paradigm that combines aspects and technologies coming from different approaches. Ubiquitous computing, pervasive computing, Internet Protocol, sensing technologies,
communication technologies, and embedded devices are merged together in order to form a system
where the real and digital worlds meet and are continuously in symbiotic interaction. The smart object
is the building block of the IoT vision. By putting intelligence into everyday objects, they are turned into
smart objects able not only to collect information from the environment and interact/control the physical
world, but also to be interconnected, to each other, through Internet to exchange data and information.
The expected huge number of interconnected devices and the signicant amount of available data open
new opportunities to create services that will bring tangible benets to the society, environment, economy and individual citizens. In this paper we present the key features and the driver technologies of IoT.
In addition to identifying the application scenarios and the correspondent potential applications, we
focus on research challenges and open issues to be faced for the IoT realization in the real world.
2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction
Due to the huge advancements in the elds of electronics and
the deployments of wireless communication systems, mobile
devices and ubiquitous services (providing anytime-anywhere
connectivity to the users) spread rapidly over the past decade.
Today, however, the role played by devices is no longer limited
to connect users to the Internet, but it has been expanding becoming an opportunity to interlink the physical world with the cyber
world [1], leading to the emergence of Cyber-Physical Systems
(CPS) [2,3]. The notion of CPS refers to a next generation of embedded ICT systems where computation and networking are integrated with physical processes and they control and manage
their dynamics and make them more efcient, reliable, adaptable
and secure [49]. Information about physical processes, for example gathered through sensors, are transferred, processed, and used
in the digital world, but they may also affect physical processes
through feedback loops, for example by using actuators [1]. The
peculiarity of CPS is that the ICT system is designed together with
the physical components to maximize the overall efciency, thus
being in contrast with classic embedded systems where the goal
is to include electronics/computing/communication/abstraction
in an already operating physical world.

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CPS will have a great impact on the future society and humans,
and their social networks, will play a central role in bridging the
cyber, physical and social worlds [1013]. Through their interactions with ICT devices, they will gain access to the virtual world
affecting the way information is distributed and they will give their
contribution to build/modify the cyber infrastructure.
The economic value associated with the CPS will also be large.
In the 2013 report,1 McKinsey Global Institute has identied twelve
technologies that, by 2025, will have massive, economically disruptive impact, driving profound changes in many dimensions: in citizens lives, in business and across the global economy. Specically,
four technologies fall within CPS: (i) automation of knowledge work,
(ii) Internet of Things, (iii) advanced robotics, and (iv) autonomous/
near-autonomous vehicles. Among them, the Internet of Things (IoT),
with an estimated value of 36 trillion of dollars, is considered the CPS
paradigm with the highest economic impact [14].
IoT refers to an emerging paradigm consisting of a continuum of
uniquely addressable things communicating one another to form a
worldwide dynamic network. The origin of IoT has been attributed
to members of the Auto-ID Center at MIT, the development community of the Radio-Frequency Identication (RFID), around 2000 [15].
Their idea was visionary: they aimed at discovering information
about a tagged object by browsing an Internet address or a database
entry corresponding to a particular RFID. To address the above idea,
1
http://www.slideshare.net/brandsynapse/mgi-disruptive-technologiesfullreport
may2013?related=1.

E. Borgia / Computer Communications 54 (2014) 131

Fig. 1. The emerging IoT scene.

they worked on the development of the Electronic Product Code (EPC),

i.e., a universal identier that provides a unique identity for every
physical object [16], with the aim of spreading the use of RFID in
worldwide networks. Today, the concept of thing is more general
and is not limited to RFID only. A thing can be any real/physical
object (e.g., RFID, sensor, actuator, spime,2 smart item3) but also a virtual/digital entity, which moves in time and space and can be uniquely
identied by assigned identication numbers, names and/or location
addresses. Therefore, the thing is easily readable, recognizable, locatable, addressable and/or controllable via Internet. Moreover, this
new generation of devices is smart thanks to the embedded electronics
allowing them to sense, compute, communicate, and integrate seamlessly with the surrounding environment. The association one
device/one function disappears, but the whole set of objects becomes
the place where the function is activated, resulting all widely distributed. The emerging IoT scenario is depicted in Fig. 1 [17]. Smart
devices will form the so-called sensory swarm and will be the majority
of the system. They will be extremely heterogeneous in terms of
resource capabilities, lifespan and communication technologies. They
will exceed classic devices such as smartphones and tablets, which, on
the contrary, will form a way for accessing Internet [18]. At the core,
instead of having traditional computation systems, the Cloud will provide the abstraction of a set of computers and will offer computation
and storage services. It is envisaged that the number of connected
things4 will exceed 7 trillion by 2025 [19], with an estimate of about
1000 devices per person. A part of them will be wearable [20], but
the majority will be in the infrastructure. In this vision, humans will
be completely immersed in the world of technology, leading to the
so-called Immersed human.
To make the concept of IoT more concrete, let us consider the
city ecosystem as an example and how the city of the future will
look like [21]. The city is the economic and social life core of a
nation. Today, half of the global population is concentrated in the
cities and consume its resources (e.g., light, water) every day.
Urban population is constantly growing and this implies an inevitable increase in the resource consumption that undermines the
environment. Quality, sustainability and security are crucial and
unavoidable issues for the city. The realization of sustainable and
secure cities requires intelligent solutions that ensure the
2
Spimes are objects that can be tracked in space and time and during their entire
lifespan univocally through an identier and the use of technologies such as RFID and
GSM. They are very economical and eco-friendly (i.e., they can be recycled) and can be
improved over time. For example, the recording of their entire life cycle can be used to
revise and modify the object itself or some specic behavior.
3
Smart items have very advanced features such as to adopt autonomous and
proactive behavior. For instance, they are able to generate trafc autonomously for
certain purposes, or execute data processing or perform communication in a
collaborative form.
4
From now on we will use the terms thing and object interchangeably.

efciency at multiple levels aiming to: (i) a more aware and optimized usage of the offered resources, (ii) a minimization of
environmental impact, for example by reducing CO2 emissions, and
(iii) a tangible increase in the life quality in terms of safety, health, and
wellness. Indeed, a smart city is a city that operates simultaneously
on two levels: one physical and one virtual. The smart city provides
a management of its services (e.g., transport, energy, lighting,
waste management, entertainment) through the widespread usage
of ICT technologies. Such technologies provide a logical/virtual
infrastructure that controls and coordinates the physical infrastructure in order to adapt the city services to the actual citizen
needs, while reducing waste and making sustainable the city
[21]. IoT will be essential to turn a traditional city into a smart city
and the traditional and more emerging sectors such as mobility,
buildings, energy, living, governance will also benet of it. For
example, smart mobility services will be created to provide effective tools to the citizens to accurately plan their journeys with public/private transportations, bike/car/van sharing services or multimodal transport systems. Intelligent trafc lights and static/mobile
sensors spread in the city can be used to automatically manage the
trafc, to monitor/predict situations of trafc jam and to warn
drivers about the presence of critical situations, also proposing
them alternative routes/means in real time. At the same time, data
gathered by sensors [22,23] will help municipalities to monitor the
condition of the roads (e.g., presence of potholes, slippery, not
draining roads), to plan the waste collection service (e.g., volumetric sensors may measure lling level of trashcans and report to
sanitation headquarters when full/close to full), to perform environmental monitoring and territorial prevention by measuring
water level, air pollution, presence of a certain component (i.e.,
percentage of allergenic pollen or radiation in the air) [24]. Energy
management will also be optimized by using a smart grid for monitoring and modify consumes in town and buildings through actuators and by using renewable energies for the production [2528].
Fig. 2 provides a schematic representation of the smart city. It will
be equipped with a network of sensors, cameras, screens, speakers,
smart meters, and thermostats that will collect information. The
gathered information, the so-called Big Data (the name refers
to its large volume and its heterogeneity in terms of content and
data representation), will not be used for the improvement of just
a single service/application, but it will be shared among different
services [15]. To this aim, a common platform for operational management of the city a sort of City Operating System will be
responsible for managing, storing, analyzing, processing, and forwarding it where needed within the city to improve services and
adapting to human needs. This management layer, no longer vertical but horizontal, will ensure interoperability, coordination, and
optimization of individual services/applications through the analysis of information ows. Citizens/authorities will access the services offered by the platform through their applications, will
consume them and will actively participate by creating additional
content that will be provided as further input to the City Operating
System.
As also highlighted by the above example, IoT will bring tangible
benets to the environment, the society, individuals and business
with the creation of new intelligent applications, services and products in various domains whilst ensuring the protection and privacy
of information and content exchanged [29]. The economic value
associated with IoT will be large and the benets enormous: for
example, it is envisioned a US GDP increase by 25% by 2025 with
a faster productivity growth and an increase of job creation [30].
IoT will offer a potential to affect the economic activity across industries, inuencing their strategic decisions, their investments and
their productivity. Currently, about 20% of the GDP comes from
industries working in the digital, while the majority of the GDP
(about 80%) comes from primarily physical industries. IoT will bring

E. Borgia / Computer Communications 54 (2014) 131

Fig. 2. Schematic representation for smart city.

those industries that are primarily physical (i.e., agriculture, construction, manufacturing, energy, transportation, healthcare) closer
to the cyber world and will radically change their way of making
business. At the same time, thanks to IoT, the largest software companies will make a shift to the physical world. For instance, recently
Google acquired a company producing thermostats to enter its
trademarks in the smart home world. Another example is IBM that
is interested in intelligent solutions for trafc management and
smart grid. Future business and marketing strategies of Google,
Facebook, Apple, IBM are clearly delineated: the future market is
the IoT, where capital investments are focused and where it is essential to be present and make great effort not to be left behind and lose
its own competitiveness.
From the above description it is clear that, for the IoT vision to
successfully emerge, a number of different technical challenges
need to be faced and solved. They range from hardware, architecture, communication, discovery, data processing, data and network
management, power and energy storage, security and privacy to cite
a few of them. The main purpose of this paper is to draw a picture of
the IoT paradigm. We will focus on the technologies enabling the
underlying IoT fabric, and on the current IoT research activities,
highlighting the most signicant contributions and solutions proposed over the recent years. Emphasis is also put on standardization
activities, which represent a central pillar for the IoT realization.
Indeed, it is a common understanding that an effort is required to
design standard solutions thus avoiding their excessive fragmentation. The industrial perspective has also a very important role in the
success of the IoT paradigm. We will discuss the key strategic industrial priorities providing an overview of the main sectors where
industries are making signicant investments for the mid- and longterm.
The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2
introduces the concepts at the basis of the IoT paradigm and the different visions expressed over the years by different bodies. Section 3
is devoted to the presentation of the key technologies involved in
IoT. Section 4 explores the impact of IoT on the economy and on
the society by providing an overview of the potential IoT applications. In Section 5 we analyze the IoT requirements, focusing also
on those specic features needed to support the IoT trafc, while
Section 6 identies the major milestones and challenges for the
IoT deployment in the real world. In Section 7, we give an overview
of the growing number of initiatives connected with the IoT domain,
while in Section 8 we provide a brief summary of other emerging
aspects that revolve around the IoT world. Finally, Section 9 concludes the paper.
2. IoT: different visions for a novel paradigm
The growing interest that scientic research as well as marketing and sales strategies raises onto the IoT paradigm has the

inevitable consequence that there is not a clear and unambiguous

denition of IoT. This is mainly due to the different underlying
visions with which standards organizations and research centers,
enterprises and various alliances (each one with a different
background and driven by specic interests and purposes) look
at this paradigm. The meaning of the term continuously evolves
also because technology and the ideas behind it change themselves
over time.
The term was coined by Kevin Ashton, one of the founders of
the original Auto-ID Center at MIT, who introduced it in 1999 during a presentation held at Procter & Gamble (P&G). He imagined a
world where Internet is connected to the physical world through
ubiquitous sensors and a platform based on real-time feedbacks,
which have a huge potential to enhance comfort, security and control of our lives. A few years later, members of the same MIT group
used again this concept, dening IoT as: an intelligent infrastructure linking objects, information and people through the computer
networks, and where the RFID technology found the basis for its realization [31].
However, only in 2005, when the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) published its rst report on the subject, the term
Internet of Things began ofcial and relevant to researchers,
industries and end-users. In [32], ITU explains its vision: a new
dimension has been added to the world of information and communication technologies (ICTs): from anytime, any place connectivity for
anyone, we will now have connectivity for anything. Connections will
multiply and create an entirely new dynamic network of networks
an Internet of Things. Here the emphasis is on the fact that not only
RFIDs, but also a high number of different objects univocally
addressable constitute the underlying fabric of IoT.
From 2005 on, the number of IoT denitions, and the related
activities, have run up depending on the type of organization looking at this paradigm. In [33], authors report a number of IoT visions
proposed over the past years. Specically, they distinguish three
categories: (i) Things oriented, where the focus is on the objects
and on nding a paradigm able to identify and integrate them,
(ii) Internet oriented, where the emphasis is on the networking paradigm and on exploiting the IP protocol to establish an efcient
connection between devices, while simplifying IP so that it can
be used on devices with very limited capacity, and (iii) Semantic
oriented, which aims to use semantic technologies, describing
objects and managing data, to represent, store, interconnect, and
manage the huge amount of information provided by the increasing number of IoT objects. Authors conclude that IoT is the result of
the convergence of these different visions.
Another denition comes from the Cluster of European
Research projects on the Internet of Things (CERP-IoT), which proposed its IoT vision in 2009. According to CERP-IoT, IoT blends
together different concepts and technical components that come
from Pervasive Computing, Ubiquitous Computing and Ambient

E. Borgia / Computer Communications 54 (2014) 131

Intelligence, and enhances them. IoT is seen as: a dynamic global

network infrastructure with self capabilities based on standard and
interoperable communication protocols where physical and virtual
things have identities, physical attributes, virtual personalities and
use intelligent interfaces, and are seamlessly integrated into the information network [34]. Hence, the real and physical world is in symbiotic interaction with the digital and virtual world. Physical
objects have virtual counterparts representing them, and that
become themselves active parts of the process. In addition, IoT
enable people and things to be connected not only Anytime
Anywhere with Anyone and Anything, but also use any type
of location or network and any available service. Hence, two additional concepts, i.e., Any path/network and Any service, are
introduced to complete the picture forming the so-called 6A vision.
The CERP-IoT vision has been recently extended in [35, Chapter
1] by incorporating two different concepts: (i) the Web 2.0, as a
massive user-interaction is expected and (ii) the self-sustainability,
especially in respect of possible benets for individual participants.
In particular, regarding the Web 2.0 technology, its primary advantage is the use of simplied and intuitive interfaces to enable users
to provide web contributions, regardless of their technical expertise. This is fundamental as the interaction between things and
users will be one core issue in the future Web of Things. Combining
then the various concepts, authors have summarized their own IoT
vision as: the future Internet of Things links uniquely identiable
things to their virtual representations in the Internet containing or
linking to additional information on their identity, status, location or
any other business, social or privately relevant information at a nancial or non-nancial pay-off that exceeds the efforts of information
provisioning and offers information access to non-predened participants. The provided accurate and appropriate information may be
accessed in the right quantity and condition, at the right time and
place at the right price. The Internet of Things is not synonymous with
ubiquitous/pervasive computing, the Internet Protocol (IP), communication technology, embedded devices, its applications, the Internet of
People or the Intranet/Extranet of Things, yet it combines aspects
and technologies of all of these approaches [35, Chapter 1].
In addition to smart objects, another fundamental component
for the realization of the IoT vision is represented by Machine-toMachine (M2M) communications. The term M2M is deliberately
general to emphasize that it does not refer to any specic communication technology, but rather to a number of both wired
and wireless technologies that allow devices to communicate.
This vagueness has given rise to an intense debate about how

much actually innovative is such communication paradigm,

resulting in two contrasting schools of thought. On the one hand,
the more conservative and cautious vision does not consider
M2M completely novel, but rather the natural extension of
embedded systems. On the other hand, the more looking-forward
vision looks at M2M as a completely revolutionary technology
able to radically change the world, as it has been in the past with
the era of computer rst, and Internet then. Regardless of the paradigm prospective, M2M communications essentially deal with
combining electronics, telecommunication and information technologies in order to connect from billion to trillion of devices
and remote systems, and are characterized by low power, low
cost and low human intervention. The following denition was
provided by the ETSI Technical Committee on Machine-toMachine Communications (ETSI TC M2M): Machine-to-Machine
(M2M) communication is the communication between two or more
entities that do not necessarily need any direct human intervention
[36]. The novelty of the paradigm does not lie in the technology
used for communication, rather in the environment, where runs
consisting in a number of devices that grow quickly, and in the
way of interaction, which does not require any form of human
intervention.
3. IoT driver technologies
The realization of the IoT vision described above goes through
an inevitable evolution in the network and services infrastructure.
The approach largely used by current systems is called silo or
stove-pipe because of its vertical approach: each application is
built on its proprietary ICT infrastructure and dedicated devices
(see Fig. 3). Similar applications do not share any features for managing services and network, resulting in unnecessary redundancy
and increase of costs. As explained in the smart city example, this
totally vertical approach should be overtaken by a more exible
and horizontal approach, where a common operational platform
will manage the network and the services, and will abstract across
a diverse range of data sources to enable applications to work
properly. As shown by Fig. 4, applications will no longer work in
isolation, but will share infrastructure, environment and network
elements, and a common service platform will orchestrate on
behalf of them [15]. Fig. 4 also shows the three different phases
with which the physical-cyber world interaction takes place. Specically, they are: (i) collection phase, (ii) transmission phase,
and (iii) process, management and utilization phase. Each phase

Fig. 3. Classic representation for applications seen as vertical silos.

E. Borgia / Computer Communications 54 (2014) 131

Fig. 4. Horizontal representation for IoT applications. A non-exhaustive list of technologies and protocols is shown.

is characterized by different and interacting technologies and

protocols and has different purposes and functions as discussed
below:
(i) Collection phase: it refers to procedures for sensing the
physical environment, collecting real-time physical data
and reconstructing a general perception of it. Technologies
such as RFID and sensors provide identication of physical
objects and sensing of physical parameters, while technologies such as IEEE 802.15.4 or Bluetooth are responsible for
data collecting.
(ii) Transmission phase: it includes mechanisms to deliver the
collected data to applications and to different external servers. Methods are therefore required for accessing the network through gateways and heterogeneous technologies
(e.g., wired, wireless, satellite), for addressing, for routing
(e.g., LEACH, RPL, Trickle).
(iii) Processing, managing and utilization phase: it deals with
processing and analyzing information ows, forwarding data
to applications and services, and providing feedbacks to control applications. In addition, it is responsible for critical
functions such as device discovery, device management,
data ltering, data aggregation, semantic analysis, and information utilization.
The remaining of the section is devoted to describe each phase
and the main features of major IoT technologies. The interested
readers may refer to specic standards and references herein for
further information.
3.1. Collection phase
The rst step towards IoT is the collection of information about
the physical environment (e.g., temperature, humidity, brightness)
or about objects (e.g., identity, state, energy level). Data acquisition
is encompassed by using different sensing technologies attached to
sensors, cameras, GPS terminals, while data collection is generally
accomplished by short range communications, which could be
open source standard solutions (e.g., Bluetooth, ZigBee, Dash7,
Wireless M-BUS) as well as proprietary solutions (e.g., Z-Wave,
ANT). Table 1 shows the main technologies used for collected data.
A fundamental role is covered by the RFID technology [37,38].
RFID allows to identify objects, people or animals, store information about them and transfer it via wireless communication to

other electronic devices. The RFID system consists of two main

components: the tag and the reader. The tag is directly applied
to an object and identies it through the Electronic Product Code
(EPC), while the reader is the element that collects data from the
tag and transmits it to the Internet world. There are two main
types of RFID tags: passive and active. The former has no power
supplies and can transmit data by using the energy that the reader
emits during its passage. Passive tags are very affordable since they
are very small, inexpensive and have potentially long life. Their
main drawback is that the area in which the tag-reader transmission may take place is very limited (3 m [39]). On the contrary,
active tags are equipped with their own power supply (e.g., a battery), thus covering greater distances when communicating and
performing more complex operations (e.g., they may have sensors
installed to monitor the environment). Obviously, the duration of
the battery affects their lifetime. Transmissions between tags and
readers can take place in four different frequency bands, which
are generally used for different application scenarios: Low-frequency (LF) operating in the 125/134 kHz and 140/148.5 kHz
ranges, High-frequency (HF) operating at 13.56 MHz, Ultra-high
frequency (UHF) operating at 915 MHz (US) and at 868 MHz
(Europe), 2.4 GHz and higher (Microwave tags).
Another essential technology for the development of IoT is
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) [40]. WSNs are a powerful technology for gathering and processing data in a large variety of
domains, from environmental monitoring [24] to intelligent agriculture [41]. Traditional WSNs consist in a high number of static
and resource constrained sensor nodes deployed in an area to
sense a certain phenomenon, e.g., temperature, and humidity.
Sensors are usually powered by small battery, have a limited
lifetime and scarce computational and memory capabilities.
Sensed data is then transmitted wirelessly via multi-hop communications towards one or a small set of sink nodes, which are more
powerful devices where the collected information is elaborated.
More recently, WSNs with Mobile Elements (MEs) have gained
popularity [4244]. In this case, MEs move in the network and
collect opportunistically data from sensors whenever they
happen to be in contact [42,4548]. As consequence, the network
density is reduced to form sparse WSNs (i.e., where sensor nodes
cannot communicate directly), the energy consumption is
distributed more uniformly in the network, and the network
lifetime increases [49,50]. Independently of the network topology,
sensors and sinks mainly operate in the 2.4 GHz band with a
rate of 250 kbit/s to exchange data. Predominant standards

E. Borgia / Computer Communications 54 (2014) 131

Table 1
Characteristics of the main technologies used for collecting data in IoT.
Technology

Example of devices

Capabilities

Data
rate

Maximum
distance

Reference standard

Application

RFID

Book/CD/DVD tag, car-sharing

cards, RFID passports, RFID
badge
Enviromental monitoring
sensors, wearable sensors,
digital camera
Smartphones, ticket stamping
machine, parking meter

Identication,
storing,
communication
Sensing, storing,
processing,
communication
Communication

Up to
640 kbps

310 m

ISO/IEC 18000

250 kbps

10100 m

IEEE 802.15.4, ZigBee,

Wireless HART, ISA 100

106
424 kbps

610 cm

ISO/IEC18092/ECMA-340,
ISO/IEC21481/ECMA-352,
ISO/IEC14443

Transportation, logistics, tracking,

animal ID, retail, access control,
payment
Health/environmental/industrial
monitoring, intelligent agriculture,
surveillance
Sharing/access information, access
control, contactless payment

Sensor

NFC

commonly used in WSN communications include: IEEE 802.15.4,

ZigBee [51,52], Wireless Highway Addressable Remote Transducer
Protocol (HART).
In the last ten years, WSNs have triggered intensive research
activities which have produced a large body of literature addressing legacy networking such as MAC [53], routing [54] and transport
protocols [55], connectivity and topology control [5658].
However, further works are still expected to increase the energy
efciency of WSN operations [5962], usage of sensor networks
in challenging environments, like underground and underwater
[6368] and intermittently connected networks [69], and to
integrate the sensors networks in the IoT world [70]. In the IoT
framework, an important role is covered by Low-power wireless
personal area networks (LoWPAN) [63, Chapter 3], [71,72], i.e., networks are made up of sensor nodes which exploit the IEEE 802.15.4
standard for energy-efcient wireless communications [52].
An additional way to collect data is through the Near Field Communication (NFC) technology.5 NFC is a communication technology
that enables devices to share information wirelessly by touching
them together or bringing them into proximity. It can be useful for
sharing personal data (e.g., contacts/business cards, videos, photos),
making transactions, accessing information from smart posters or
providing credentials for access control systems with a simple touch.
NFC can be considered as an evolution of RFID as it is built upon RFID
systems, but, differently from it, NFC allows bidirectional communications. Specically, when two NFC devices are located at a distance
lesser than 4 cm, a peer-to-peer communication between them is
created, and both devices are allowed to send and receive data.
NFC operates at 13.56 MHz on ISO/IEC 18000-3 air interface with
maximum speed of 424 kbps.
The Bluetooth technology is also used for sending data among
devices located at a short distance. Bluetooth was originally
designed for replacing wire communications with low power wireless communications [73]. Basically, devices form specic structures to communicate, named piconet. In a piconet, a device
assumes the role of master and all the others are slaves, for a maximum of seven slaves. The master decides which slave may access
the channel. Bluetooth systems operate in the 2.4 GHz band with
original data rate of 1 Mbps up to the most recent 24 Mbps.
3.2. Transmission phase
Once data is gathered through sensing technologies, it needs to
be transmitted across the network so that applications can consume it. Heterogeneous communication technologies form the
backbone to access the network [74] (see Table 2). Among the
wired technologies, the reference standard is Ethernet (IEEE
802.3), supporting transmissions from 10 Mbps to 100 Gbps over
twisted-pair coppers, coaxial cables, and optical bers. The main
advantage is that transmissions over wired networks are reliable

http://nfc-forum.org/what-is-nfc/.

and robust as they are less susceptible to errors and interference

phenomena. However, the need to physically connect devices to
allow communications is costly and requires work in case of
changes. Therefore, a common way to access the network is
through Wireless LAN (WLAN). In this case, wireless devices transmit and receive packets to/from a base station, which is connected
to the Internet, within a radius of few tens of meters. There are several wireless technologies with different transmission rates and
covering different distances [75]. The WiFi family (IEEE 802.11a/
b/g/n) may operate in different frequency bands (2.4 GHz or
5 GHz) by implementing different modulation schemes. Data communications may reach up to 54 Mbps, supporting distances up to
100 m. The IEEE 802.11n version includes the possibility of using
MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) antennas to increase the
available bandwidth for transmission/reception. WiMAX (IEEE
802.16) is the corresponding wireless communication standard
for longer distances (up to kilometers). It operates in a very wide
spectrum (i.e., 266 GHz) with data rate up to 70 Mbps. It is a connection-oriented technology, thus a station cannot transmit data
until the base station has not allocated a channel for it. This allows
also to support QoS [76]. Broadband technologies (i.e., xDSL) are
generally used for connecting home end systems to the Internet.
They have been conceived to support asymmetrical communications to allow higher data rate from the Internet to home, as home
users are more likely to be consumer instead of being producer of
information. There exists a variety of transmission rates reaching
very impressive speeds: from 12 Mbps up to 55 Mbps for downstream, and from 1 Mbps to 20 Mbps for upstream. Cellular networks (GSM, GPRS, UMTS, HSPA+ and LTE) play a central role in
the way of accessing the network. Specically, emerging LTE technologies [77] offer users the possibility to be connected in a dispersed as well highly connected and mobile environment,
enabling not only voice exchange but also high value services
(e.g., ubiquitous multimedia services [78]) thanks to the allowed
high data rate. Satellite communication technologies can also be
used as a means to connect to the Internet. They are particularly
useful for users located in remote areas that cannot access to
broadband connections, where deploying terrestrial connection is
costly, or as a way to cross the sea/ocean. Basically, a satellite
receives a transmission on a frequency band, regenerates the signal, and transmits it over another frequency. The main drawback
is that, due to the large Earth-satellite distances, a propagation
delay of 280 ms is introduced in the communication.
Wireless technologies, due to their exibility, will be the main
communication paradigm for the IoT. However, the limited wireless spectrum available for cellular networks constitutes a major
constraint in the widespread use of these wireless technologies.
To overcome this limitation, several approaches are under active
research: cognitive radio networks, opportunistic networking,
and heterogeneous networks (possibly) with ofoading. The
research on cognitive radio networks is aimed at exploiting the
wireless spectrum in an efcient way by dynamically allocating
the spectrum to secondary users when the primary users (who

E. Borgia / Computer Communications 54 (2014) 131

Table 2
Characteristics of the main access networks in IoT.
Technology

Reference
standard

Transmission
medium

Frequency bands

Data rate

Maximum distance

Limitations

Ethernet

IEEE 802.3
u/z

Twisted-pair
copper wire,
coaxial cable,
optical ber

10 Mbps,
up to 100 Gbps

100 m,
up to 5070 km

Shared medium,
physical connection
among devices

WiFi

IEEE 802.11
a/b/g/n

Wireless

2.4 GHz,
5 GHz

154600 Mbps

up to 100 m

Sensitive to the presence

of household appliances,
interference among
WiFi communications

WiMAX

IEEE 802.16
a/d/e/m

Wireless

266 GHz

up to 70 Mbps

Up to 5080 km

Low practical data rate,

sensitive to weather
conditions, high
installation
and operational costs

xDLS

ADSL,
ADSL 2+,
VDSL

Twisted-pair
copper wire,
coaxial cable

Up to 2.2 MHz

1255 Mbps (d)

120 Mbps (u)

5.41.3 km

Asymmetrical
communication

Cellular

GSM, GPRS,
UMTS,
HSPA+, LTE

Wireless

9001800 MHz
21001900 MHz
8002600 MHz

9.6 kbps, 56114 kbps,

56 Mbps (d)/22 Mbps (u),
300 Mbps (d)/75 Mbps
(u)

Macro/micro/pico/
femto cells
(10 m to 100 km)

Limited wireless
spectrum

Satellite

BSM,
DVB-S,

Wireless

48 GHz (C band),
1018 GHz (Ku
band),
1831 GHz (Ka band)

16 kbps to 155 Mbps

GEO sat.: 35,786 km

MEO sat.: 500
15,000 km
LEO sat.: 2003000 km

280 ms propagation delay,

huge launching cost,
almost impossible
repairing

Electrical
power system

130 MHz

>100 Mbps

Up to 1500 m
to the premise,
up to 100 m
between devices

Mutual interference
with other technologies

DVB-TS
PLC

HomePlug AV,
IEEE 1901

hold the spectrum license) are not using it [79,80,44]. Effective

spectrum sensing algorithms [81], to verify the presence of primary users [82,83], and the assignment of the spectrum to the
users [84,85] are key components of a cognitive radio network.
This is a very active research area but several challenges are still
to be addressed to solve the vulnerabilities of these networks
[83,86]. Opportunistic networks [87] exploit, whenever possible,
direct device-to-device communications (e.g., by exploiting WiFi
of Bluetooth) to optimize the usage of the spectrum by using
short-range wireless links to reduce the interference on the radio
channels and the usage of scarce spectrum available for cellular
networks. Opportunistic networks belong, together with WSN, to
the class of mobile multi-hop ad hoc networks [88]. This class of
networks includes other self-organizing and infrastructure-less
networking paradigms that can be worth using in the IoT world
such as wireless mesh networks [89] and vehicular networks
[90], which are still under active development [91,92]. The availability of several medium/short range wireless technologies, which
can help to optimize the use of the scarce wireless medium,
represents an interesting opportunity for ofoading the trafc from
congested cellular networks and to make a more efcient use of
the scarce spectrum. Therefore, designing effective mechanisms
for guaranteeing seamless handovers among these technologies
is a very important and hot research issue [93,94] that is triggering
intense research activities [9498].
Another important technology to gain access to Internet is the
Power Line Communications (PLC) that carries data by exploiting
the electrical power system as transmission medium [99]. Generally, it is used for smart meters as well as Home Area Networks
(HAN), but can be used as alternative to xDLS providing asymmetrical transmissions (i.e., 256 kbps in upload and 2.7 Mbps in download). The main drawback is the mutual interference among PLC
and other technologies, e.g., radio interference with signals on frequencies used by amateur radio groups.

3.3. Processing, managing and utilization phase

In this phase, information ows are processed and then forwarded to applications. The Service Platform & Enabler covers a
fundamental role for managing the above operations. It is crucial
for hiding the heterogeneity of hardware, software, data formats,
technologies and communication protocols characterizing IoT
[100]. It is responsible for abstracting all the features of objects,
network, and services, and for offering a loose coupling of components. Additional features are service discovery and service
composition.
To address the above challenges, the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) concept can be inherited and applied to IoT [15]. As SOA
standards were originally designed for connecting programs running on static computers, their direct application to IoT devices is
not feasible but requires an adaptation to this context. Basically,
the SOA approach relies on three layers, each responsible for different functionalities. The rst layer is responsible for objects abstraction, i.e., each object or single functionality implemented by the
object is abstracted and represented as service. In addition, it offers
semantics and procedures to access objects. The second layer is
responsible for the management of objects and services, providing
a way to automatically and dynamically discover them, monitor
them, and make public their status. Additional responsibilities
are to remotely manage services, and to maintain a correspondence between objects and the available services on them. Finally,
the third layer provides all the mechanisms for the service and
objects composition, i.e., it manages how to dynamically and
real-time form new services from a single or set of basic services.
In addition, the presence of a repository ensures to maintain an
updated view of all currently connected service instances.
For the full realization of IoT, cloud computing can also be
adopted. The term cloud refers to virtualized resources of
computation and storage, which can be dynamically allocated by

E. Borgia / Computer Communications 54 (2014) 131

applications and without human intervention, allowing the digital

world to efciently and exibility work. The cloud seems to be the
natural home for IoT applications [101]. Indeed, data collected by
objects is mainly streamed online, and IoT applications may use
it if it is available in the cloud. To this aim, IoT objects need to
be connected to the cloud for storing and retrieving required data.
The cloud may be used for handling the high volume of data and
its high generated speed thanks to tailored mechanisms for
dynamically and automatically provisioning storage resources
[102104]. It also provides efcient mechanisms to access virtual
storage, either through cloud database clusters and virtualized
physical storage, greatly increasing the local storage capacity,
which is very limited in most cases. Finally, the cloud may resolve
efciently several issues such as the semantic description of cloud
services (e.g., the OSGi specication supports a lightweight
description of services and their dynamics for resourceconstrained devices), the data processing problem for instance by
allocating/deallocating dynamically processes, and the extraction
of useful information for example by leveraging on specic
solutions from the Big Data context.
The current Internet architecture (based on host-to-host connectivity) was designed for sharing resources rather than data. It
addresses content by location and hence it is not suitable for IoT
which is based on sharing data. Therefore, the research on novel
information-centric Internet architecture [105110], protocols
[111] and mechanisms [112,113] is a relevant research area for
the IoT community, as well. Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems [114] represent one of the most important types of content-centric Internet
technologies that can be used in IoT, for example to implement
efcient mechanisms for discovering available resources and
capabilities in IoT. Among the two classes of P2P systems, the
structured ones, based on Distributed Hash Tables (DHT), are the
most promising due to a set of properties they exhibit. They
are scalable, efcient, resilient to node failures, and distribute
responsibility and load among peers deterministically by highly
controlling the overlay network topology and by placing content
on specied locations, which make subsequent queries performed
by lookup service more efcient. Due to the environmental
heterogeneity, service discovery for IoT will also be able to support
exible identication scheme, multi attribute query, or range
query, and Prex Hash Tree (PHT) [115], Mercury [116], MAAN
[117], or Squid [118] can be contributing solutions to handle such
a complex queries.

4. Application domains
IoT has huge potentialities for developing new intelligent applications in nearly every eld. This is mainly due to its double ability
to perform situated sensing (allowing for instance to collect information about natural phenomena, medical parameters, or user
habits), and to offer them tailored services. Irrespective of the
application eld, such applications aim at enhancing the quality
of every-day life, and will have a profound impact on the economy
and society. They will also cover different aspects: personal, social,
societal, medical, environmental, logistics to cite a few. The various
applications can be grouped in three major domains: (A) industrial
domain, (B) smart city domain, and (C) health well-being domain.
Each domain is not isolated from the others but it is partially overlapped since some applications are shared. An example is the
tracking of products, which is in common between the industrial
and the health well-being domains as it can be used for monitoring
cargos or foods, but it is also able to monitor the delivery of pharmaceutical products.
Fig. 5 shows the subdivision in the aforementioned domains
and provides a non-exhaustive list of IoT applications for each of

them. Note that not all IoT applications have currently the same
level of maturity. Some applications, typically the simplest and
the most intuitive for the user, are already part of our daily lives.
Many others are still in an experimental phase as they require
greater cooperation between the various actors. Finally, others
are more futuristic and are at an early stage. The remaining of
the section provides the description of the most prominent applications for each domain.
4.1. Industrial domain
The IoT can be exploited in all industrial activities involving
commercial or nancial transactions between companies, organizations and other entities. Indicative examples are logistics, manufacturing, monitoring of processes, service sector, banking,
nancial governmental authorities, intermediaries, etc.
4.1.1. Logistic and product lifetime management
A rst relevant example of an industrial IoT application is the
logistics and supply chain management. RFIDs can be attached to
objects and used to identify materials and goods, be they garments,
furniture, equipment, food, and liquids [119]. Their use help to
manage efciently warehouses and retails, and to simplify the
inventory by providing accurate knowledge of current inventory,
while reducing inventory inaccuracies. The entire lifecycle of
objects can be tracked too [120]. For example, RFID readers
installed along the production plant allow to monitor the production process, while the label can be traced throughout the entire
supply chain (e.g., packaging, transportation, warehousing, sale to
the customer, disposal). Advanced IoT systems, composed of
RFID-equipped items and smart shelves tracking items in real time,
may help to reduce material waste, thus lowering costs and
improving prot margins for both retailers and manufacturers.
For example, it has been estimated an approximate 8.3% reduction
on sales if shelves remain partially free of merchandise [121].
Underproduction and overproduction may reduce drastically by
having a correct estimate of needed items, which can be inferred
by analyzing data collected by smart shelves. In addition, the
real-time analysis by sensors allows to identify product deterioration events, which is of vital importance for food and liquids. For
example, to ensure the freshness of perishables (e.g., fruits, vegetables, frozen food), sensors may monitor continuously temperature
and humidity inside storages or cold storages, and actuators may
modify them to make optimal the conservation of contained food.
Additionally, product integrity may be guaranteed by using RFIDbased authentication processes. Other interesting IoT applications
are intelligent shopping systems. Such systems monitor users purchasing habits by tracking their mobile phones and guide them in
shops/supermarkets/malls suggesting discounted products or
helping in fast payment operations (e.g., automatic check-out
using biometrics).
4.1.2. Agriculture and breeding
IoT may assist in agriculture and breeding. Indeed, regulations
for traceability of animals require a continuous monitoring of animals and of their movements in order to report promptly to the
appropriate authorities any relevant events, e.g., diseases. Usage
of IoT identication systems (e.g., RFID, sensors) allows to identify
and monitor animals [122], and to isolate any infected animals
from the healthy ones, thus avoiding the spread of contagious disease. Advanced microchips may store information about the status
of the animal (e.g., demographic information, veterinary checks,
contracted diseases, vaccines performed) [122] or transmit information about the animals body health (e.g., temperature) to
streamline animal health certication, to control trade and
imports, and to avoid possible frauds. By analyzing collected data,

E. Borgia / Computer Communications 54 (2014) 131

Fig. 5. IoT application domains and related applications.

authorities may verify the actual number of livestock reported by

local breeders and provide subsidies, accordingly. Monitoring and
controlling agricultural production and feed (e.g., presence of
OMGs, additives, melanin) by using advanced sensor systems are
further applications of IoT [123,41]. Such systems will ensure the
health of plant origin products intended both for human and animal consumption [124]. Advanced IoT services may speed up the
management for the registration/modication/closing of farms,
their monitoring and the issuance of health authorizations. By
using IoT, single farmers can break the long chain of producerconsumer sales, which employs freight or large companies to reach
consumers, and will be in direct relationship with consumers. For
example, they can provide a publicity window of their farm, realtime showing their offered products to allow customers to order
them by using suitable mobile applications [125].
4.1.3. Industrial processes
IoT can offer advanced solutions in the automotive industry.
Real-time vehicle diagnostic is a key application. Everything can
be monitored by specic sensors: tire pressure, motor data, fuel
consumption, location, speed, distance from other vehicles, driving
time, stops, driver presence. The sensed data is then reported to the
center system [126]. The wireless identiable technologies
attached to vehicle parts can maintain the history of specic automotive components and be used to improve the assembly process
by automatically nding missing pieces. The application of IoT
technologies enables advanced transportation systems for people
and goods. Fare collection, safer luggage management based
on automated tracking and sorting, intelligent screening of

passengers, are some examples. Smart industrial management

systems, based on IoT technologies, allow to monitor industrial
plants, for instance to reduce the number of accidents, especially
in case of high-risk plants (e.g., oil plants, gas plants). For example,
sensors attached to containers transporting hazardous goods
may emit different signals to announce the chemical component
contained and the maximum level of that component. In case of
critical situations (e.g., being close to the maximum level of a
chemical component in a specic geographical area, or incompatibility among chemical components within containers in
proximity), sensors may automatically send alarms to control
centers that, in turn, manage promptly such dangerous situations.
4.2. Smart city domain
IoT may help to increase the environmental sustainability of our
cities and the peoples quality of life. Emphasis is on energy and
how to manage it efciently, and on seeking smart solutions to
enjoy the personal stay.
4.2.1. Smart mobility and smart tourism
As explained in Section 1, IoT will transform a traditional city
into a smart city. Indeed, IoT technologies, consisting of networks
of sensors, cameras, screens, speakers, smart grid, will collect information, and the operational platform will process it to tune the different services/infrastructures of the city. IoT can be very useful for
several purposes. For example, mobile sensors directly attached to
vehicles or integrated in smartphones of car occupants can collect
information about the roads (e.g., about trafc density or surface

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E. Borgia / Computer Communications 54 (2014) 131

conditions) with ner granularity with respect to xed sensors

[127]. At the same time, vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-toinfrastructure (V2I) communications may be used to convey collected data to the control center. Smart parking systems may guide
drivers to the nearest available parking slot according to drivers
location or personal preferences (e.g., free parking space, parking
slot located in proximity of a camera), hence saving time and fuel,
and thus reducing the carbon footprint [128]. Sensors placed on
parking slots may also help municipalities to detect vehicles
parked illegally (e.g., in parking spaces reserved to individuals with
disabilities), and send tow trucks for towing away. Moreover, payment systems may become simpler and faster. Instead of the traditional coins, drivers may use NFC technology enabled mobile
phones to pay for parking, and electronic RFID-based system for
toll collection or public transport/ticket payment [129]. Additional
applications include smart services for entertainment and tourism.
For example, by taking pictures of monuments and other tourist
landmarks, the users may obtain pertinent information on the personal smartphone and be guided to discover the heritage of the city
[130].
4.2.2. Smart grid
Energy management is a requirement towards a sustainable
environment and the smart grid represents a building block for
its realization. Indeed, the spread of renewable energy sources
has led to a profound modernization of the traditional electrical
distribution system and on the way of distributing energy. The
smart grid is dened as an intelligent electrical distribution system
that delivers energy ows from producers to consumers in a bidirectional way [25]. Unlike the traditional power grids, where the
energy is generated only by a few central power plants and it is
broadcasted to the nal customers, via a large networks of
cables/transformers/substations, in the smart grid the producers
may also be the nal customers. The energy produced by the customers micro-grids (e.g., through solar panels, wind turbines) is
sent to the grid, which, in turn, manages it appropriately through
smart energy control services and stores it in specic energy storages. Monitoring and exchanging information about energy ows
are additional applications of the smart grid. Using smart meters,
automatic control devices, smart switches, smart appliances, the
grid is able to know in advance the expected demands and to adapt
the production and consumption of electricity, consequently
avoiding peak loads, eliminating possible blackouts and acting
promptly in case of failures/leaks [131]. Information concerning
consumed electricity is also delivered to customers in order to
increase their personal awareness about energy consumption habits and to led them to a more rational energy usage. The latter can
be obtained for instance by using incentives and by offering exible pricing (e.g., variable rate pricing). The smart grid can also be
integrated with the smart city, thereby enabling other intelligent
services. Sustainable electric mobility is a typical example. Electric
charging stations (e-stations) connected to the grid contribute to
the diffusion of electric vehicles (e-vehicles), allowing for e-vehicles charging in a fast, safe and easily accessible way to all citizens
[132,133]. Smart cards will allow automatic customer recognition
and the customization of the charging process. Additionally, future
services will include the possibility to book charging slots in
advance and to enjoy entertainment services integrated into e-stations. Finally, the energy produced for example by renewable
energy plants can be stored in the vehicle battery for an immediate
use or sent back to the grid for further utilization via Vehicle-toGrid (V2G) communications.
4.2.3. Smart home/building
Homes/buildings in a smart city will be outtted with a myriad
of sensors and smart devices (e.g., broadband gateways, mobile

phones, laptops, PCs, TV, speakers, appliances, plugs, surveillance

cameras, lights, window shades, thermostats, and meters) that,
integrated with communication technologies within buildings
and residential homes, give rise to a wide range of applications.
Home automation systems are certainly attractive since allow to
control everything remotely via web applications. Some applications use the simplest capabilities enabled by IoT, such as applications for security purpose (e.g., video surveillance, intrusion
detection, access management), for plant management and maintenance (e.g., fault detection, asset management/maintenance),
for service automation (e.g., HVAC, lighting, irrigation), and for
entertainment systems (i.e., distribution of multimedia throughout
the home). Other types of applications are integrated with the
smart grid and optimize the domestic consumption [134]. For
example, the Home Area Network (HAN) allows appliances to
interact also with smart meters in order to reduce costs while
ensuring the requested performance. This can be achieved through
services that schedule the various activities of household appliances (e.g., washing machine or dishwasher cycles) in a dynamic
and intelligent way avoiding the expensive periods and/or peak
periods (i.e., with highest power demand). More advanced applications may allow to use the smartphone as the unique remote control to manage all the home devices/appliances (e.g., to turn off
some appliances left on heedlessly) and to monitor users habits
[135] by tracking their mobile phones to make more comfortable
the home living. For example, from the analysis of the information
ows, the system can learn the time when a person arrives at
home, hence unlocking the door, turning up the light and powering
on the boiler to ll the bath tub. Such automatic operations can be
always rescheduled or canceled by the user at any time.
4.2.4. Public safety and environmental monitoring
Local and national governments aim at creating secure society,
by guaranteeing public safety and by planning emergency management accurately. The public security services include the maintenance of public order, the prevention and protection of citizens,
and the safeguard of public and private properties. Emergency
management assists the society in preparing for and coping with
natural or man-made disasters such as chemical leaks, oods, re,
earthquakes, tornadoes, epidemics, and electrical outages. IoT
offers solutions for monitoring and tackling these emergency scenarios [136]. Data collected by xed cameras located within the
city and on personal citizens devices allow advanced video surveillance and territorial monitoring services, while helping the police
to control public order in case of sport events, musical performances, political meetings. Safety of private and public buildings
(e.g., banks, shops) can be reinforced by using sensor technology
that will trigger alarms. Emergency operations can be improved
and strengthened through the use of IoT technologies. Currently,
the emergency system lacks of precise information about the
emergency site. Dedicated sensors and intelligent cameras, as well
as GPS and wireless technologies providing real-time localization
[137,138] and tracking [139,140], can be used to form a complete
map of the event [141], to forecast its trends (e.g., direction and/
or speed of re spread, major risk areas), and thus to establish a
dynamic emergency plan to coordinate the rescue operations. Let
us consider a re outbreak in a building where the access is controlled through e-cards. If persons have to swipe their personal
e-cards to enter the building, the reghters will know the exact
number of people inside the building and where they are located
(if the building has a localization system), and are able to guide
people toward the nearest escape route or to guide remen to save
trapped people. In addition, data from wireless video camera and
other equipment installed on the remen helmets will provide
real-time information on the re evolution to calculate the best
escape routes, and/or building collapse time. Alarms generated

E. Borgia / Computer Communications 54 (2014) 131

by wearable sensors on remen (e.g., due to fast or irregular heartbeat) may also provide a reliable way for monitoring the health
status of rescue persons.
4.3. Health well-being domain
IoT will play an essential role to develop intelligent services for
supporting and improving peoples and societys activities. These
range from enabling citizens and communities to get involved in
administration and government decisions (e.g., e-participation),
allowing people to live independently (e-inclusion) or to maintain
their social relationships, to improve the health and social care.
4.3.1. Medical and healthcare
The medical and healthcare sector will be strongly affected by
IoT. Advanced sensing devices allow real-time monitoring of medical parameters and vital functions (e.g., temperature, blood pressure, heart rate, cholesterol level). The gathered data is then
transmitted via standard or specic communication technologies
(e.g., Bluetooth, ZigBee, WirelessHART, ISA100) and made available
to medical personnel for diagnosis and control of the patients
health. Body Area Networks (BANs), formed by wearable devices
connected to each other, allow doctors to continue the remote
patients monitoring out of the hospital [142]. Other relevant applications are related to the identication of materials and medical
instrumentations. For example, the application of smart labels will
ensure to accurate tracking objects to prevent equipment to be lost
or stolen, or that material is left inside a patient during an operation (for example gauze or other small objects). The use of smart
labels is also important to facilitate the inventory of medical equipment. Efcient hospital management services include energy optimization and HVAC systems (similar to those discussed in Sections
4.2.2 and 4.2.3) and safety access systems. The latter refer to the
digital control of accesses enabled by smart badges (e.g., equipped
with RFIDs) to limit the access of some hospital areas to authorized
personnel only. The hospital will also be t out with a number of
Internet access points (totem) - representing a mean within
the hospital to book exams or to check where/when the medical
exams will be performed. Beds will be equipped with smart touchscreen terminals, allowing patients to access to entertainment services, TV channels, Internet, and to communicate with their
families. In addition, young patients may used them to participate
in school educational services (e.g., virtual class, accessing to
archived lessons).
4.3.2. Independent living
IoT may also provide several advantages for improving the
quality of life of citizens, for example supporting independent living (e-inclusion) and proving lifestyle suggestions for well-being.
The e-inclusion focuses mainly on specic categories of people,
such as aging or disabled population (see for example the Ambient
Assisted Living (AAL) Joint Programme by European Commission),
allowing them be active in society. Monitoring of condition/status
of elderly and emulating the medical consultation at home are key
applications. By monitoring real-time physiological signals captured through sensors, the system will be able to set off medical
alarms (e.g., in case of detected falls [143]), to suggest possible hospitalization, to diagnose dementia (e.g., Parkinson, Alzheimer) in
the earliest stage by observing deviations from normal behaviors.
Personal assistants available on PC screens or TV will stimulate
persons to do exercise [144], and guiding them in searching objects
in the house. In addition, as elderly people often have limited
mobility and may be housebound, social networks will allow
elderly to connect, communicate and exchange status, feelings
and ideas, and participate in debates and discussion groups
[145]. Obviously, simplied and customized interfaces and the

11

systems ability to acquire and anticipate actions will be key

requirements. Mobile assistants are other fundamental services.
They will provide elderly a secure way to move condently in town
or use public transportations safely. By combining data gathered
by personal mobile devices (equipped with e.g., position sensors,
orientation sensors, movement obstacle detection sensors, video
camera) and data gathered by sensors located in the city, the
mobile articial-intelligent-based system will reconstruct perceptions of the environment, which will be verbalized to persons by
synthesized voice. Similar applications will be exploited by visual
impaired persons to increase their ability to move in the city
[146,147]. Wellbeing and lifestyle services will also be important.
Such services will capture users habits to provide them suggestions to improve their quality of life. Positive feedbacks, for example notifying the number of kilometers (calorie) covered (burnt)
during a walk, and the positive impact on their health, will motivate people to repeat daily the same activity. In addition, information derived from the users habits could measure the impact of the
individual behavior on the urban environment and increase the
users awareness of each single action on the environment sustainability [127].
5. Key IoT features
As discussed in the previous section, IoT can open new opportunities to create innovative applications. Some applications strictly
belong to a specic domain and exhibit characteristics peculiar of
that domain. Conversely, others applications exhibit characteristics
cross-cutting multiple domains. In this section we discuss the most
signicant IoT characteristics. Firstly, we look at the IoT general
features, then we focus on trafc features characterizing the
M2M communications, which may dependent on the specic
application.
5.1. General features and requirements
Table 3 summarizes the IoT general requirements. Heterogeneity
and scalability will be of primary importance in a complex and
dynamic system as the IoT. Solutions to cope with the above
requirements must be sought at architectural level, at naming/
identication/addressing level, at communication level, and at
level of object name/code mapping services. Minimizing costs can
be guaranteed by optimizing the operational costs (i.e., development, installation, maintenance), as well as by developing from
scratch energy-efcient solutions. In addition, as IoT will exhibit
a low human intervention (if not completely absent), objects
should offer self- capabilities. Among the offered self- capabilities,
notable are: (i) high degree of conguration autonomy, (ii) selforganization and self-adaptation to various scenarios, (iii) selfreaction to events and stimuli to which objects are subjected,
and (iv) self-processing of the huge amounts of exchanged data,
which can also be used by third parties. Observance of Quality of
Service (QoS) is mandatory for those services and applications characterized by sensitive inelastic (real-time) trafc. Finally, IoT
should also guarantee a secure environment in terms of security
of communication/authentication, integrity of data and devices,
privacy of users and personal data, and trustworthiness of the environment and of the involved parties.
5.2. Communication requirements
In addition to the general requirements discussed above, there
exist a number of specic requirements related to the trafc generated and transmitted by IoT devices, i.e., communication requirements. However, not all communication requirements need to be
supported by each IoT device. Specically, we can identify some

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E. Borgia / Computer Communications 54 (2014) 131

Table 3
IoT general requirements.
Requirement

Requirement description

Heterogeneity
Scalability
Cost minimization
Self-*

Managing the variety of devices/technologies/services/environments

Avoiding the explosion of resources/exchanged data/operations
Optimization of development/maintenance costs and energy consumption
Self-conguration, self-organization, self-adaptation, self-reaction to events
and stimuli, self-discovering of entities and services, self-processing of Big Data
Dynamic management/reprogramming of devices or group of devices
Observance of QoS guarantees (e.g., bandwidth, delay) to services/applications
Robustness to communication attacks, authentication, data transfer condentiality,
data/device integrity, privacy, trusted secure environment

Flexibility
QoS
Secure environment

general communication requirements that should be met by each

IoT device, while others are peculiar of specic services, and hence
should be provided only by those devices offering that service.
Table 4 summarizes the main communication features that are necessary for the correct establishment of M2M communications
[36,148].
The backbone of the IoT network will be composed of heterogeneous communication technologies (e.g., wired, wireless, cellular,
hybrid). This implies that communication protocols should be able
to interface with the different underlying networks, to support different addressing schemes, and to dynamically adjust them when
needed in order to reduce the network load. Fundamental will also
cope with the concurrent or almost concurrent transmissions from
an extremely large number of devices towards the same access
point, for instance through efcient MAC protocols. In addition, high
reliability of communications should be ensured regardless the
operating environment (e.g., mobility, quality of the channel). In
some cases, communications should manage different levels of priority and ongoing communications may be interrupted in order to
serve ows with higher priority. As well known, mobility greatly
affects wireless communications. Therefore it will be essential to
support seamless mobility and roaming, but also to operate efciently in environments composed of stationary or low mobility
devices. The IoT environment consists in devices with limited
resource capabilities that, to save energy, may temporarily disconnect from the network and wake on demand. Communication
protocols should handle transmissions towards such nodes,

reducing also the overall energy consumption. Different trafc

proles and time-requirements should be also handled. Finally,
communication protocols should be invulnerable to various attacks.
Preventing the compromise of credentials or conguration, being
robust to network attacks (e.g., hacking and DoS), securing the
integrity of communications and timestamps, ensuring anonymity
where necessary by masking identity and location of the requestor,
and identifying any abnormal events are example of how to
guarantee security.
5.3. Mapping applications/trafc features
To conclude here we report an example of mapping between
the communication features discussed above and a subset of the
applications described in Section 4. As shown by Fig. 6, some
requirements are in common with multiple service applications,
while others belong to only a few. For example, the management
of simultaneous transmissions is a characteristic shared by several
applications such as video surveillance and public safety. On the
contrary, priority access is a prerogative of surveillance systems
and security, where alarm messages must have a higher priority
with respect to other active ows. Furthermore, some services
must satisfy simultaneously more than one requirement, e.g.,
smart grid. Healthcare applications are, on the other hand, characterized by massive device transmissions that have to be highly reliable and have to respect extremely stringent delays when
delivering medical data.

Table 4
IoT communication features.
Feature

Feature description

Different underlying networks

abstraction of the different underlying networks (e.g., wired, wireless, cellular), support for
different communication modes (e.g., access point-based, p2p fashion)
support of anycast/unicast/multicast/broadcast transmissions, dynamic replacing of broadcast
with multicast/anycast to reduce network load
handling simultaneous or nearly simultaneous transmissions from huge number of devices
(i.e., efcient MAC protocols)
guarantee of connectivity/reliable transmissions based on different solutions (e.g., link
adaptation protocols, modulation/coding schemes, multi-path establishment)
management of priority levels of services and communications services (e.g., preemption
mechanisms)
optimization of communication paths based on different policies (e.g., network cost, delay,
transmission failures), dynamic metric selection
seamless roaming and mobility, communication management towards stationary and
low-mobile devices
managing communication towards sleeping devices
include mechanisms for reducing energy consumption
functions for supporting data acknowledgment, failure notications, and interaction mode
management of data trafc with different trafc proles (e.g., continuous transmissions, long
periods between two data transmissions, small amount of transmitted data, burst of data,
bidirectional/unidirectional transmissions)
support of data trafc with different time requirements (e.g., time-controlled trafc,
delay-tolerant trafc, extremely low-latency trafc)
report the device/gateway location to other devices/applications continuously/upon request
integrity of communications and timestamps, anonymity of identity and location, detection
of abnormal events

Addressing modes
Massive device transmission
High reliability
Enhanced access priority
Path selection
Mobility
Sleeping devices
Low power consumption
Notication and interaction
Trafc prole

Time-dependent trafc
Location reporting support
Secure connections

E. Borgia / Computer Communications 54 (2014) 131

13

Fig. 6. Example of mapping among IoT applications and communication features.

6. Milestones and challenges

As described in Section 3, IoT is the result of many different
technologies used to gather, process, infer, and transmit data. It
is apparent that an extraordinary effort is required to combine all
these different forces as well as to address all the correspondent
challenges. In this section we focus on the most important research
areas discussing the main issues and showing the major milestones
achieved so far. More specically, aspects related to architecture,
addressing and mobility of objects are discussed in Sections 6.1,
6.2 and 6.3, respectively. Networking and gateway access issues
are the objectives of Sections 6.4 and 6.5, respectively. We analyze
problems arising with the management of the huge number of
devices in Section 6.6 and of the huge amount of data in Section 6.7.
Trafc characterization issues are discussed in 6.8. Finally, Section 6.9 covers security aspects.
6.1. Network architecture and system design
Finding a scalable, exible, secure and cost-efcient architecture,
able to cope with the complex IoT scenario, is one of the main goal for
the IoT fast adoption. A number of different architectural solutions
have been proposed in the past years [149153]. In addition, some
proposals are tailored for specic applications (e.g., healthcare
[154], meter reading [152], enterprise services [155]), while others
for specic technologies [156,35]. However, an excessive multitude
of technical solutions makes interoperability difcult, slowing down
the IoT development process. Therefore, developing an IoT reference
architecture is an objective that recently has found a great support
within the IoT community. To this aim, the major standards bodies
(e.g., 3GPP, IEEE, ETSI) started working for its realization, and their
effort resulted in the design of two network architectures: (i) a hierarchical network architecture for scalable connectivity [157], and (ii)
a hierarchical network architecture for high capacity [158,148]. Both
solutions are based on a hierarchical organization of the network
that allows to satisfy the IoT requirements. In the rst case, the
emphasis is on the network scalability, ensuring a reliable and efcient connection between the multitude of devices. In the second
case, the emphasis is on the efcient management of the high trafc
load to which the network is expected to be subjected. In the remainder of this subsection, we present a quick overview of the two proposed architectures, examining their main features.
6.1.1. Hierarchical network architecture for scalable connectivity
The promoter of this architecture is the ETSI Technical Committee for Machine-to-Machine communications (ETSI TC M2M),
established in 2009 with the specic purpose of developing and

maintaining an end-to-end (e2e) network reference architecture

for M2M. The idea is to realize an IP-based architecture relying
on existing technologies that: (i) is scalable, (ii) is easily developed,
(iii) has low complexity, (iv) is efcient and interoperable, (v) uses
standardized interfaces and protocols, (vi) hides the complexity of
underlying networks to applications developers, and (vii) fosters
the development of new services [159,157].
Fig. 7 shows the high-level architecture, which is composed of
three domains (i.e., the Device and Gateway domain, the Network
domain, and the Application domain) and several elements.
Specically:
 Device and Gateway domain: it consists in a high number of
M2M devices, one or more gateways (M2M GWs), and one or
more M2M Area Networks, which provide the physical/MAC connectivity between M2M devices and M2M GWs. A M2M device
runs the applications and may connect to the remote server
(outside this domain) in two ways: (i) establishing a direct connection with the Access Network if advanced features (e.g., capabilities for managing registration, authentication, authorization)
are supported by the M2M device, or (ii) passing through the
M2M Area Network and the M2M GW (or multiple M2M
GWs). Any of the short-range technologies listed in Section 3.1
can be used within M2M Area Network. The M2M GW acts as a
proxy between M2M devices and the network domain by forwarding data to/from the remote server. It may also run M2M
applications and has local intelligence to gather data and make
further processing.
 Network domain: it consists in Access Networks and Core Networks, and provides connectivity between the M2M GW(s)
and M2M application(s). Access Networks include xDSL, HFC,
PLC, W-LAN, WiMAX, satellite, UWB technologies, while Core
Networks include 3GPP GPRS and 3GPP EPC for example. The
Core Network provides additional features such as IP connectivity, network control and management (e.g., provisioning, supervision, fault management), roaming and interconnection with
other networks.
 Application domain: applications (both on the client side and
on the server side), middleware, and other common features
ensuring interactions between applications and devices (i.e.,
M2M Service Capabilities (SC)), reside in this domain. The M2M
Server resides also here, and stores all data gathered by M2M
devices, making data available to applications after further
elaborations.
The ETSI M2M Architecture is based on the REpresentational
State Transfer (REST) [160] architectural style, where any logical

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E. Borgia / Computer Communications 54 (2014) 131

Fig. 7. The high-level ETSI M2M reference architecture (Source: ETSI M2M).

Fig. 8. The high-level 3GPP MTC reference architecture.

and physical entity is represented as a resource that has a particular

state which can be manipulated (e.g., a sensor is a resource that can
be read and congured). Resources are uniquely addressable, and
can be accessed as web links by using web browsers via HTTP. Specically, each resource is represented as an instance of a M2M SC,
and M2M applications and network entities exchange information
and handle them by using standardized procedures, which are
based on CRUD (i.e., Create, Retrieve, Update, Delete) operations.
To standardize these procedures, a number of interfaces have been
dened, as well as the operations allowed on them for the communication [157]. Specically, these interfaces are: (i) device application interface (dIa), used by applications on devices and gateways
to communicate with the local SC, (ii) M2M to device interface
(mId), used for the intra-SCs communications, and (iii) M2M application interface (mIa), used for communicating with the SC on the
network. In addition, each Service Capability instance is responsible for a subset of resources that are modeled and structured as
a recursive hierarchical tree.
6.1.2. Hierarchical network architecture for high capacity
In this case, the focus is on providing an architecture able to
efciently support high trafc loads, resulting not only from
voice/audio/video exchange services, but also from the presence
of a high number of transmitting devices. 3GPP is the principal
investigator of an architecture for high capacity based on cellular
to support Machine-Type Communication (MTC). The term MTC
has been coined by 3GPP to highlight that M2M communications
may consist also on interactions between machines and humans
(i.e., M2H communications or H2M communications).
The 3GPP activity on the network architecture aims principally
at optimizing LTE to support MTC trafcs and applications. At the

same time, it aims to: (i) lower operational costs of network operators when offering MTC services, (ii) reduce the impact and effort
of handling large MTC groups, (iii) optimize network operations to
minimize impact on device battery power usage, and (iv) stimulate
the development of new MTC applications [148,161].
Fig. 8 depicts an overview of 3GPP MTC architecture, highlighting also the basic elements: MTC device, MTC server, and MTC
Interworking Function, which is in charge of authorizing the communications and triggering the devices. As in the previous case,
three different domains can be distinguished: the MTC device
domain, the communication network domain, and the MTC
application domain. The peculiarity of this architecture lies in
the communication network that in this case is a 3GPP mobile network. Specically, since the dominant technology is LTE-Advanced
[162], a multi-tier connectivity can be offered. Indeed, macrocells
with LTEs base stations (eNBs) can provide a large and ubiquitous
coverage to the MTC devices as well as manage their high mobility
[94,163]. In contrast, cells with relay nodes (RNs), picocell with
eNBs, and femtocells with home eNBs (HeNBs), bring link connectivity close to MTC devices, increasing reliability and the overall
system capacity [164].
Two different communication models are envisaged. On the one
hand, an MTC user can access and control the MTC devices through
one or more MTC servers. In this case, the MTC server is provided
by an operator, and the user accesses the server through APIs specied by the operator itself. The MTC server location does not modify the access modality. MTC servers can be positioned in the
operator domain or placed outside the operator domain, but the
access procedure is the same. On the other hand, the MTC devices
can communicate with each other directly, without the help of
intermediaries, regardless of the operator to which are connected.

E. Borgia / Computer Communications 54 (2014) 131

6.2. Addressing and naming

Finding efcient mechanisms to retrieve all content produced
by (and available on) the various objects is another important IoT
topic. Indeed, it is fundamental that users, regardless of their position, may access and use the data generated by objects. In other
words, in this section we try to answer to the following questions:
(i) how can we identify and interact with the huge number of IoT
objects? and (ii) how can we make it efciently if IoT objects are
heterogeneous for characteristics and technologies?
Addressing is the mechanism commonly used to identify
objects (e.g., computers, laptops, routers, switches, small devices)
within a network. In IP-based networks, IPv4 and IPv6 represent
the two possible choices. However, as IPv4 relies on 32-bit
addresses and IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) allocated the last blocks of IPv4 addresses in July 2011, IPv6 is the only
feasible solution. IPv6 provides a huge address space as relies on
128-bit addresses, and it will be certainly able to identify all IoT
objects. However, even if the premises of using IPv6 are encouraging, nding a unique solution is extremely challenging for the heterogeneity of the identier lengths used by the different
technologies.
In the sensor context, IETF IPv6 over Low power Wireless
Personal Area Networks (6LoWPAN) working group focuses on
solutions to make IPv6 compatible with IEEE 802.15.4, and denes
an intermediate layer, named adaptation layer, between the 802.15.4
data link layer and the IP network [165], whose objective is to map
IEEE 802.15.4 addresses on IPv6 addresses, and vice versa. A PAN
refers to a group of IEEE 802.15.4-based sensor devices physically
close. Each PAN is identied by an address directly mapped on a
specic IPv6 link. IEEE 802.15.4 devices may have a local address
(but unique within a PAN) of 16 bits, or a global unique address
of 64 bits. Hence, the IPv6 address associated with the single
sensor node is obtained by concatenating the address of the PAN
and the address of the sensor node. The adaptation layer is also
in charge of providing mechanisms (e.g., encapsulation, header
compression, fragmentation, reassembly) allowing IPv6 packets
to be sent/received correctly over IEEE 802.15.4 based networks.
Specically, header compression techniques reduce the IPv6
header from 48 bytes to 6 bytes through a process that eliminates
redundant information, which can, however, be retrieved from the
link layer or the contest application. To fragment IPv6 datagrams to
t into 127-byte fragment (i.e., the IEEE 802.15.4 MTU), each
fragment stores additional information for its correct identication: (i) the size of the original IPv6 packet, (ii) the offset indicating
the position of the payload carried by the fragment in the original
IPv6 packet, (iii) the information to distinguish the rst fragment
from the others, and (iv) a random number to distinguish different
fragments belonging to different IPv6 packets.
In the RFID context, as RFIDs rely on different addressing
schemes with variable lengths (i.e., 64 bits, 98 bits), a number of
different research solutions have been proposed during the past
years. A rst approach is to use directly the EPC. For example, in
the 64-bit case, in [166] the IPv6 address associated with an RFID
tag is obtained by concatenating the ID of the GW connecting the
RFID system to the Internet (rst 64 bits) with the identier of
the RFID tag (second 64 bits). Therefore, the GW has also to manage and handle messages to and from the RFID. Specically, for
each message generated by a RFID, an IPv6 packet is generated
where the source address is obtained as described earlier and the
RFID message is encapsulated in its payload. A reverse process is
executed to handle messages from the Internet and intended to
RFID reader. Conversely, for 96-bit addresses, the mapping
between the RFID identier and IPv6 address is performed by an
agent, a dedicated element within the RFID reader [167]. Specically, the agent generates a virtual physical address by using the

15

RFID tag ID and, by using such virtual address, asks for an IPv6
address to the DHCP server. It also maintains updated the mapping
in a table, which is checked every time it needs to forward packets
generated from RFID to the outside world or vice versa. Recently,
alternative solutions are proposed, which are independent from
the RFID addressing scheme, and do not require any address-translation mechanism. For example, in [168] each RFID network is connected to the IP network via the so-called RFIPv6 gateway and
nodes outside the RFID network can nd information on a specic
tag via the RFIPv6 gateway.
Another important research challenge is connected with the
address retrieval: how can we retrieve the address associated with
an object starting from the available information about that
object? In addition, how can we determine which is the object
associated with a given address? Essentially, these issues are similar to those solved, in the legacy Internet architecture, by the classic Dynamic Name Service (DNS). Within the RFID context, this role
is played by the Object Name Service (ONS) [169,170], which
implements a simple lookup service that resolves the EPC number
in the EPCIS server address of the manufacturer of the searched tag.
To ensure scalability and to maintain separate information related
to different object classes, ONS is organized as a hierarchy of
lookup services. Basically, the lookup process consists in the following steps: (i) a rst check in the Root OSN, which contains
the Local ONS addresses for each EPC Manager Number; (ii) a second check in the Local ONS, which identies the address of the
EPCIS server associated with the specic EPC, and (iii) a direct
access to the EPCIS server where the desired information is stored.
Unfortunately, ONS cannot be used for the reverse process, i.e.,
retrieving information associated to a specic EPC number. To this
aim, the Object Code Mapping Service (OCMS) has been proposed.
To improve the scalability of OCMS service, both in the storage and
search capabilities, authors of [171] propose a web service where
the repository of tag description is implemented as a P2P network.
Major open issues consist in the lack of knowledge about the
robustness of services such as OCMS, when used in large-scale systems. Furthermore, ONS and OCMS work only within the RFID
environment. Solutions for different technologies, such sensors
and other devices, are missing.
6.3. Objects mobility
A large part of IoT objects are not xed, but have a certain
degree of mobility (e.g., products in an assembly line and transported by containers). As a consequence, supporting and managing
efciently the mobility of this large amount of objects is of paramount importance.
A feasible solution is the use of MobileIPv6 [172], where, to each
mobile node (the mobile object in IoT context) are assigned a permanent address on its home network (home address) and a temporary address on each network who is visiting (Care-of Address
(CoA)). Two different agents storing the information about mobile
nodes location are used: the home agent stores the permanent
address, while the foreign agent is used when the node visits a foreign network, to announce the CoA. One of the main home agent
tasks is to intercept packets destined to a mobile node, and redirect
them to the mobile node using the CoA announced through an IP
tunnel. However, recently, it has been shown that these
approaches may not be sufciently scalable in IoT environments
due to a huge amount of signaling trafc to discover devices and
to maintain updated their positions. To deal with the above issues,
in [173] authors exploit a natural phenomenon, named object group
mobility (OGM). According to OGM, objects usually move in group
and aggregate around a carrier (e.g., a person, a vehicle, a box),
named group master (GM). GM is the entity that takes care of
assigning addresses to objects that belong to its home network,

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E. Borgia / Computer Communications 54 (2014) 131

and keeps continuously updated their CoA, without the need of

generating management trafc between the object and its home
agent. This approach also reduces the uncertainty in objects localization. Indeed, an object, which cannot be located for example
because its access technology does not cover a given area, can be
localized, with a low approximation degree, by using those objects
belonging to the same group, whose locations are known.
6.4. M2M communications
The nature of IoT scenarios presents a high number of technical
challenges related to communication protocols. Among these, signicant research efforts have been devoted to addressing the routing issues and the e2e reliability.
6.4.1. Routing
Routing is one of the key network functionalities for IoT environments as it selects the multi-hop paths that data packets follow
from the source to reach the destination. Several technical challenges make the design of routing protocols for M2M communications complex. First, most of the communicating objects are
resource-constrained devices in terms of computation, memory
and energy capacity. In addition, the routing protocol must operate
in very large networks. Finally, communication technologies typically used for M2M communications are characterized by low data
rates, frequent packet losses and time-varying channel conditions.
Accordingly, suitable routing solutions for M2M communications
should be scalable, reliable and minimize resource consumption.
Existing routing protocols designed for mobile ad hoc networks
are inadequate for this context. Conversely, solutions for wireless
sensor networks (WSNs) are a promising starting point. Various
categories of protocols exist: (i) clustering routing protocols (e.g.,
LEACH [174], HEED [175]) organize the network into hierarchical
structures [62,176,177], which can be problematic to create and
maintain; (ii) geographical routing protocols (e.g., greedy solutions
[178], EtE [179], BGR [180], VCCSR [48]) use nodes positions to
build network paths, but geographical information is difcult to
maintain in mobile networks; and (iii) protocols with mobile sinks/
data collectors [181,42] use additional mobile elements (e.g.,
robots) to facilitate data collection. In addition, some solutions
exploit cross-layer optimizations to automatically adjust protocol
parameters in order to minimize power consumption [182]. Others
are based on an efcient combination of multi-hop protocols and
duty cycling [183]. Finally, in application scenarios characterized
by very low duty cycle (0.1%), solutions where control overhead
is minimized are preferred [184]. For instance, in [185] nodes do
not maintain persistent information about the networking state,
which is on the contrary stored by the gateway. As a consequence,
the overhead for the storage of state information is signicantly
reduced, as well as the code running on sensors is simplied. The
proposed solution uses an approach similar to AODV to establish
route and commands nodes along the selected route to switch
channel before downloading large amount of data. Recently, the
IETF Routing Over Low power and Lossy networks (ROLL) working
group has focused on designing a routing protocol specic for IP
smart object networks. Based on a careful analysis of routing
requirements of several IoT applications (e.g., smart grid, industrial
automation, home networks, building automation), the WP has
dened the RPL routing protocol [186,187], able of operating in
large-scale networks composed of tiny devices communicating
over low-power and lossy networks (LLNs) technologies and incorporating some of the above approaches. RPL has been designed to
work efciently with trafc ows from RPL nodes towards an
aggregation point (named root or LoWPAN Border Router (LBR)),
but it supports also the trafc in the reverse direction (although
less efciently), and some basic functionality for point-to-point

ows. Basically, RPL builds Destination Oriented Directed Acyclic

Graph (DODAG) using an objective function and a set of metrics.
In contrast with traditional networks, in LLNs nodes and link metrics change over time, and it is important that the routing protocol
adapts dynamically to these changes [188,189]. The DODAG formation process starts at the root that announces its presence by sending DIO messages and ensures that DODAGs do not overlap (i.e.,
each node belongs to only one DODAG). From the above discussion,
it emerges that many general routing issues still need to be
addressed, for example how to cope with the heterogeneity of
devices capabilities (and communication technologies) that affect
the amount of information that can be stored and used for computing optimal paths.
6.4.2. End-to-end reliability
Other fundamental features are those implemented by the
transport protocol that should guarantee e2e reliability and should
perform e2e congestion control in the network. Intuitively, TCP,
which is used in Internet networks, is unsuitable for M2M communications because: (i) it produces a too high overhead during connection setup and termination phases, which is unacceptable for
M2M short-lived connections and (ii) it is based on a congestion
control mechanism ill-suited for connections which transmit small
amount of data. Conversely, the UDP protocol can be used in many
resource-constrained connections thanks to its low overhead and
its connectionless property. The downside, of course, is lack of reliability. Very few works exist in literature aiming at designing efcient M2M transport protocols. One solution is SCTP [190], a
lightweight TCP variant specically optimized for multi-streaming
and multi-homing. Specically, the multi-homing SCTP feature
guarantees to support mobility without the need to use any special
router agents in the network. Another approach adds the reliability
mechanisms at the application layer (e.g., CoAP [191], MQTT
[192]), even though this is generally less efcient. The Constrained
Application Protocol (CoAP) has been designed with IoT requirements in mind, targeting at resource-constrained devices and at
the REST paradigm for objects addressing. It is a one-to-one protocol for transferring state information between client and server. It
is characterized also by low overhead and low parsing complexity.
Reliability of communications are guaranteed by QoS mechanisms
based on acknowledgments. When the reliability of transmissions
is fundamental (e.g., in scenarios of public safety and emergency),
the Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol [192],
proposed by OASIS open standards consortium, is a viable solution.
MQTT employs a publish/subscribe mechanism to support energyefcient one-to-many message distribution in a reliable manner.
Moreover, the integration of sensor applications with other
existing applications is guaranteed by MQTT-S [193]. MQTT-S,
extension of MQTT, has been designed keeping low-end and
battery-constrained sensors/actuators in mind. However, novel
reliable transport protocols are needed to cope with congestion
issues that may arise due to the scale of the network, while taking
into account that M2M communications are short-lived and
involve the transmission of few bytes per message.
6.5. Flexible GWs
The gateway (GW) is another key component of the IoT architecture as it interconnects smart devices to the network core.
GW has to be extremely versatile and exible, managing efciently
many aspects (e.g., access, resources, QoS, security, multimedia
conversion), and catering for the different characteristics of
devices. The design of exible gateways, incorporating all the
above characteristics, is extremely challenging. A good example
of heterogeneous environment where the choice of the gateway
is important is the Home Area Network (HAN). HAN will in fact

E. Borgia / Computer Communications 54 (2014) 131

be outtted with a variety of applications (e.g., HVAC systems,

lighting control systems, smart grid systems, medical systems,
entertainment systems) and, consequently, with numerous body/
personal/local subnetworks. The key issue is to avoid that each system has its own gateway, but to converge toward a unique and
integrated solution representing the only contact point used by
the homeowner to interact with the home environment. Moreover,
as devices on HAN are generally characterized by low power constrains, GW should be able to understand which processes and
energy resources are available, and to disseminate data by means
of smart routing and caching techniques to minimize the usage
of resources. A number of solutions have been proposed. For example, in [194] the gateway exhibits self-conguration and advanced
cognitive capabilities. The Software Dened Radio (SDR) technology
can also be used [195]. SDR [196] allows to develop the operating
radio functions via software, thus ensuring exibility and
interoperability. Therefore, SDR-based gateways can be multicarrier and multi-band, allowing the interoperability between
different communication protocols, on different frequency bands,
and on different frequencies. SDR-based solutions have been
proposed also for the vehicular environment [197], where the
gateway supports cellular, Bluetooth, and ZigBee technologies, as
well as communication between vehicles internal components
(e.g., audio, diagnostic, and navigation systems). Additional
GW solutions based on user-space programmable software are
proposed in [198,199], and allow a exible plugging of protocols.
Moreover, benets can also be obtained by GW solutions that
provide cross-layer interactions involving all levels [198].
6.6. Device management
Management of objects is of paramount importance for the
development of the IoT. IoT applications require, not only that
objects are connected and communicate over a wide number of
communication technologies, but also that devices and appliances
are remotely managed. The management process is complex, and
includes a lot of different actions, such as switching on/off the
device, conguring the device/network, updating rmware/software, recovering from errors, monitoring the device/network and
gathering data and connectivity statistics.
Solutions for an efcient device management should take into
account the heterogeneity of devices and of their available
resources. Indeed, typical IoT devices are resource constrained,
thus they do not provide much memory, processing and power
capabilities. Standardized device management solutions, such as
TR-069 [200], SNMP [201], and NETCONF [202], are generally used
for the management of resource-rich devices and appliances such
as routers, switches, and smartphones. It is a common understanding that such solutions are not particularly useful for the management of a large number of constrained devices, also because they
generate a high volume of trafc to send control commands and
a high footprint on the device. However, in [203] authors demonstrate the feasibility of implementing the above existing device
management protocols also on resource-constrained devices. Specically, authors consider the Atmel AVR Raven device (equipped
with 16 KB RAM and 128 KB program memory) and analyze a
number of performance gures such as the memory usage of each
component and the time taken for transferring and processing
SNMP and NETCONF requests. Their results show that using these
protocols is benecial, especially in those scenarios where it makes
sense to deploy existing management protocols because they are
already in usage by the other devices. In addition to the classic
device management protocols, newer solutions may be used. For
example, OMA Device Management (OMA-DM) [204] is a device
management protocol targeting mobile devices (e.g., mobile
phones, PDAs), but, due to its design characteristics (i.e., small

17

footprint device, constraints on communication bandwidth, security mechanisms), can be extended to resource-constrained IoT
mobile devices. Its peculiar feature is the usage of SMS for wake
up and bootstrapping operations. Recently, the OMA Lightweight
M2M (LWM2M) management protocol [205] has also been proposed. It is considered the successor of OMA-DM and has been
designed targeting constrained devices. It is built on top of COAP
and features REST-based architecture. SMSs are used for wakeup
operations but also for other management operations (i.e., GET,
PUT, POST).
6.7. Data management
Managing Big Data is extremely challenging due to the different
data properties. IoT data will be sampled by a variety of objects and
sensors, each having different methods for data representation and
semantics. Moreover, the large number of IoT devices will lead to a
rapid explosion of the scale of collected data (petabytes and more).
Collected data will have often a timespace relationship (i.e., position and time information) to describe the dynamics of the objects
location (i.e., the so-called pervasive location information). In contrast with todays applications, where data is usually consumed by
single applications, data will be shared among different IoT applications, thus requiring a greater interoperability. The last data
property is connected with the data multi-dimensionality, i.e.,
the integration of different type of sensor data to monitor simultaneously a number of indicators, such as temperature, pressure, light.
IoT data properties generate new data management issues that
change the way the system works. Indeed, IoT data management
moves from being a classic ofine system, where storage/query
processing/transaction operations are managed ofine, to be an
online/ofine system, where processing and analysis are also
real-time.
Scalability of data is an important problem. Efcient indexing
methods need to be developed in order to nd a specic data item
easily. Suitable representation schemes are also needed to capture
the heterogeneity of objects and metadata, and to enable their selfdescription. In addition, interoperability among different data is
also important. Approaches introducing an abstraction level may
solve them. Ontologies and semantics look to be promising. For
example, Web Ontology Language (OWL) [206] is a family of language for representing ontology in the web that can be adapted
to IoT. Effective methods should be also developed for ltering
redundant data or events. For example, an efcient RFID data ltering solution has been proposed in the supply chain context [207].
The research attention should be also devoted to nding suitable
languages for accessing data. Structured Query Language (SQL) is
the most popular language for querying structured data. However,
data in IoT will be mainly semi-structured, hence alternative solutions should be considered. The XML Query (XQuery) language
[208] seems a suitable choice allowing to query structured data
as well as less structured data. For what concern data process modeling and data interoperability issues, the SOA approach can provide suitable solutions. For instance, in [209], a SOA-based
scheme has been proposed for managing heterogeneous data from
different devices. Specically, the proposed scheme is implemented as Web Service. Features implemented by devices are
encapsulated into services, and a common interface for invoking
services is dened. However, even though SAO-based approaches
are encouraging, several other issues need to be solved, e.g., to
guarantee the respect of the ACID (i.e., Atomicity, Consistency,
Isolation, Durability) properties.
The data archiving is another important problem covering a
number of correlated challenges. Firstly, as time passes and data
may become obsolete, suitable policies to retain or not data are
required. Inadequate policies may lead to loss of data, inaccurate

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E. Borgia / Computer Communications 54 (2014) 131

recording, or missing of information. Solutions relying on semantic

continuity of data elements by using timestamps can be adapted to
solve the aforementioned issues [210]. Secondly, suitable models
for storing Big Data are also challenging. Several models have been
proposed, but they are tailored for specic technologies. For example, the RFID-Cuboids model [211] manages efciently massive
RFID data, achieving a signicant data compression and speeding
up the analysis process. Finally, understanding the optimal location for storing data is also challenging. IoT data storage can be
local, distributed, and centralized. A set of researchers focuses on
centralized solutions as they assume this approach more suitable
for an environment with huge data, intensive queries, and data
shared among different applications [212]. Among the proposed
solutions, the Sea-Cloud-based massive heterogeneous data management (SeaCloudDM) system is based on relational database
and uses key-value store combination [213]. The main drawback
of SeaCloudDM lies in its inability to support concurrency due to
the distributed lock mechanism. The solution in [214] overcomes
such an issue by proposing a centralized solution based on Not
Only SQL (NoSQL [215]) systems. A second set of researchers proposes localized and data-centric storages for storing data as near as
possible to its production points (i.e., objects). To this aim, the
ideas at the basis of the Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC)
[102,216,217] can be exploited too. Specically, MCC refers to
the extension of Cloud Computing into the mobile environment
with the goal to reduce the mobile device load. Resources external
to the mobile devices (i.e., group of mobile devices in proximity,
local servers) form the so-called Mobile Cloud, and can be exploited
by mobile devices to execute applications and store data. By applying such concepts, data may be stored and retrieved from: (i) a virtual resource cloud, made up of mobile devices in proximity [218],
or (ii) a local cloudlet, which is composed of several multi-core
computers connected with the remote cloud servers [219]. MCC
shared concepts also with the area of Opportunistic Computing,
where mobile devices avail of each others resources (e.g., computational capabilities, connectivity, storage), which are abstracted as
services, to opportunistically invoke services [220222]. Finally, a
third set of researchers propose to dynamically adjust the data
storage position according to specic conditions. For example, in
[223] authors determine the optimal storage position in different
WSN topologies (i.e., tree structure, linear, grid, mesh) by taking
the geographical location of producers and data rate of exchanged
queries into consideration.
6.8. Trafc characterization
Currently, the characteristics of the trafc generated in IoT scenarios are unknown. There exists very few works in literature that
focus on analyzing the actual characteristics of M2M trafc, and the
majority aims at understanding the trafc characteristics in Home
Area Network (HAN) scenarios. A part of them relies on real experiments to measure and characterize the trafc through the access
network, such as [224,225]. Others focus on the characterization
of exchanged trafc within the HAN. For example, in [226] authors
analyze the individual effect of the most common home services
(e.g., phone calls over Internet, TV streaming, data upload and
download) on e2e performance in a controlled HAN environment.
Such analysis provides a better understanding of HAN performance
and of trafc proles within the HAN, allowing to identify when the
HAN itself is the main cause of performance disruptions. In addition, when feedbacks and incentives about the HAN utilization
are sent back to users, they may also be further motivated to a more
intelligent and rationale use of the HAN network, and consequently
improving the overall network performance [227].
Capturing realistic M2M trafc characteristics, as well as collecting information about IoT users habits, are still open issues.

Their collection is extremely important. By exploiting the statistical representations of IoT trafc ows, it will be possible to design
services tailored on users needs and requirements.
6.9. Security
Security issues are central in IoT as they may occur at various
levels, investing technology as well as ethical and privacy issues.
To ensure security of data, services and entire IoT system, a series
of properties, such as condentiality, integrity, authentication,
authorization, non-repudiation, availability, and privacy, must be
guaranteed [228,229]. This is extremely challenging due to the
IoT environmental characteristics. The scarce of objects resources
limits computation and transmission operations, while the use of
short-range low-data rate protocols greatly affects packets size
and results in a fragmentation of packets. For example, an excessive fragmentation may simplify network attacks (DoS attacks),
while lowering the overall system performance. Finally, devices
heterogeneity makes necessary to dene a minimum set of functions implemented by all the objects to support interoperability
between devices and different solutions.
We split the remaining subsection in four parts, each corresponding to a different set of security requirements, and we discuss possible solutions in order to meet them. The four identied
requirements are:
(i)
(ii)
(iii)
(iv)

secure authentication and authorization,

secure bootstrapping of objects and transmission of data,
security of IoT data,
secure access to data by authorized persons.

Depending on the application, a part of or all the above requirements should be satised. For example, let us focus on an application to monitor the medical parameters of a patient. The
monitoring activity starts when the patient arrives at the hospital
and wearable devices are used to monitor her status. The monitoring activity is performed during her stay in the hospital and for a
control period after her return at home. First of all, there must be
a correct identication and mapping between the wearable devices
and the monitored patient, and personal data must be stored safely
on the device (requirement (i)). The device has to securely join IoT,
and the transmission of collected data has to ensure integrity and
condentiality (requirement (ii)). Data is then maintained on a
remote server where secure storage mechanisms are essential
(requirement (iii)). Finally, data access should be guaranteed only
to authorized people such as doctors, who use it to monitor the
patients condition (requirement (iv)).
6.9.1. Secure authentication and authorization
SIM cards, and the most recent MIM cards (M2M SIM cards),
which have been designed specically for IoT applications, are elements that may deal efciently with security concerns. Among the
implemented features, they secure the identity of communicating
devices, perform secure data storage, and guarantee secure
authentication and authorization operations by using for example
PIN, PUK and Public Key Infrastructure (PKI).
6.9.2. Secure bootstrapping of objects and transmission of data
Bootstrapping operations refer to processing operations
required before the network becomes active and available. These
include installing and conguring credentials, keys, and certicates
on the devices. In [230,231], authors investigate how constrained
devices can securely bootstrap into a system. The order in which
objects are bootstrapped is also important. For example, in [231]
constrained devices can only be bootstrapped in circle starting
from a predened point.

E. Borgia / Computer Communications 54 (2014) 131

Security issues affecting data communications span over three

layers: network, transport, and application. The Internet Protocol
Security (IPSec) protocol [232] is the standard way to secure data
exchange at network level. However, it cannot be directly applied
to the IoT environment for several reasons: (i) the negotiation
phase, which is based on the Internet Key Exchange (IKE) protocol
[233], is computationally heavy to work on small constrained
devices, (ii) the data overhead is high, even though it could be partially alleviate with suitable header compression techniques [234],
and (iii) dynamic congurations are also difcult. An alternative
approach is the Host Identity Protocol (HIP) protocol [235], which
uses cryptographic identiers to allow enhanced accountability,
and provides easier build up of trust. The most used secure Internet
transport protocols are Transport Layer Security (TLS) and Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS), which run over TCP and
UDP, respectively. Intuitively, TLS is unsuitable for IoT for all reasons highlighted in Section 6.4, while DTLS seems to be the solution toward which the security community is moving. Obviously,
even though it is a promising starting point, some modications
are required: (i) the introduced overhead must be reduced for
example by using some specic packet optimizations or header
compression techniques [236] and (ii) e2e security issues must
be solved in case of presence of intermediate nodes (e.g., proxies,
application level GWs). An alternative way to create e2e security
is by enforcing it at the application level. Again, standard Internet
solutions (e.g., S/MIME, STRP) are inadequate because too resource
expensive, but currently no solutions exist. Finally, other solutions
can foresee cross-layer interactions among protocols to avoid
duplicating security mechanisms at different layers.
Secure data transmissions consist also in the use of cryptographic algorithms to ensure the integrity of data traveling through
the network. Conventional approaches such as Advanced
Encryption Standard (AES) [237] are inadequate. Conversely,
lightweight cryptography (LWC) algorithms seem the most
promising for this environment [238] as they are mainly tailored
to constrained devices by introducing trade-offs between security
levels, cost, and performance. Examples are Scalable Encryption
Algorithm (SEA) [239], and PRESENT [240] for symmetric cypher,
and the Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) [241] family for asymmetric cypher. The latter is able to reach the same security level
of the standard RSA requiring shorter keys and lighter operations
[242,243]. Another essential part for any protocols that use
cryptography is hash functions. Their main duties are to provide
message integrity check, digital signatures, and ngerprinting.
Recently, some solutions have been proposed keeping in mind
constrained devices in general [244], or specic device categories
such RFIDs [245,246].
6.9.3. Security of IoT data
Data aggregation is an important operations to efciently handling IoT data. Specically, it refers to the process that guarantees
that only signicant information is stored and transmitted inside
the IoT environment. Aggregation is generally executed at intermediate network nodes to minimize the amount of data transmitted.
Some forms of encryption (and the corresponding decryption) are
usually implemented to achieve condentiality, authenticity and
integrity. However, in networks with high constrained devices, this
may lead to an increase of nodes complexity to share keys, and a
higher computation and energy consumption due to need of
decrypting incoming messages. A possible solution is to use homomorphic encryption schemes, which consist in aggregating directly
encrypted data avoiding intermediate and unnecessary decryptions. A consequent advantage of using similar approaches is to
increase the overall security, as only source and destination are
capable of accessing to real data. Equally important is to guarantee
integrity and persistence to sensitive information stored in the

19

cloud, being piece of personal data or keys used by cryptographic

algorithms. Possible solutions may use on-chip ROM memory,
on-chip One-Time-Programmable (OTP) technology, and off-chip
ash memory.
6.9.4. Secure access to data by authorized persons
Security mechanisms should also guarantee that only allowed
users can access some given data, dening which operations each
single user or group of users are allowed to perform on the data.
In general, mechanisms to avoid unauthorized accesses are very
simple but efcient. For example, data could be protected by some
passwords/passcodes, and a user may access sensitive data only
when he generates a request carrying the right password/passcode.
In some cases, solutions based on Sign-On (SSO) mechanisms could
be useful. Basically, SSO refers to a unied login system that allows
users to login only once, and with which users may access a group
of applications associated with the login point (i.e., all the mutual
trusted applications) without further authentication processes
[247,248].
7. IoT initiatives
As IoT is gathering its momentum, the number of initiatives
around the world taken by research organizations, industries, standardization bodies, and governments to bring IoT to a mass market,
is signicant. In this section we discuss the most representative
ones. More specically, rst we look at the major past and still
ongoing IoT projects aimed at investigating novel solutions (e.g.,
architectures, platforms, communication protocols, and tools).
Then, we discuss the main directions followed by industries as well
as those industrial sectors considered attractive for the envisaged
prot margin increase. Finally, we focus on standardization activities, which are of primary importance to remove the technical barriers and ensure the interoperability among IoT applications,
services, and networks.
7.1. IoT projects
The number of funded projects worldwide aimed at investigating the IoT challenges is rapidly increasing. Starting from 2009 the
European Commission launched the IoT initiative within the 7th
Framework Programme (FP7) focusing on the development of
architectures and optimized technologies for supporting the multitude of novel IoT-based applications and services. This research
line continued under the Internet-connected object initiative,
focused on developing context-aware, reliable, energy-efcient
and secure distributed networks of cooperating sensors, actuators
and smart devices. A wide range of EU research and application
projects have been launched within these two initiatives, supported and coordinated by the European Research Cluster on Internet of Things (IERC). IERC aims at promoting a common vision of
the IoT paradigm, facilitating also the knowledge sharing and the
secure IoT deployment at world level [249]. The US government
started funding projects on IoT almost in the same years. Specically, four research projects have been funded since 2010 as part
of the National Science Foundations Future Internet Architecture
(NSF FIA) program, which aims at designing and validating comprehensive new architectures for the next-generation Internet.
China, Korea and Japan have also started research programs about
IoT. In Korea, only recently the National Research Foundation of
Korea (NRF) decided to support projects specically on IoT.
Japanese investments on IoT started when the New Generation
Network Promotion Forum (NWGN) was established in 2007. In
addition, after the 2011 Tohoku earthquake, the IoT interest converged on specic sectors such as energy saving and renewable

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E. Borgia / Computer Communications 54 (2014) 131

energy. As far as China, the focus on IoT has grown considerably

since 2009 and it has been supported by several research and
development programs, such as: the National Basic Research Program of China (973 program), the National High Technology
Research and Development Program of China (863 program),
and the National Natural Science Foundation of China.
In the remainder of this section, we quickly overview various
IoT projects in progress or already completed around the world.
For the sake of clarity they are grouped in three main categories
according to the main objectives (see Fig. 9). Interested readers
may refer to projects website for further information.
The rst group of IoT projects focuses on the development of IoT
architectures that ensure interoperability between vertical application solutions and different technologies. A subset of them
focuses on business services and on the development of SoA-based
architectures and dynamic environments to semantically integrate
services into IoT (e.g., EBBITS [250], IoT.est [251]). Another subset
focuses on cloud computing architecture to meet the challenges
of exibility, extensibility and economic viability of IoT (e.g., NEBULA [252], BETaaS [253]). Theoretical models of the IoT architecture and the denition of an initial set of key building blocks are
key objectives of [254] and IoT-A [255], respectively. Furthermore,
the main goal of iCORE [256] and COMPOSE [257] is to develop an
open network architecture based on objects virtualization that
encompasses the technological heterogeneity, while BUTLER
[258] and MobilityFirst [259] aim at developing open architectures
providing secure location and context-aware services, transparent
inference of users behaviors and needs, and actions on their behalf
to improve their quality-of-life. The IoT6 project [260] is an example of researching the potentiality of IPv6, and related standards,
within a high-scalable SoA-based architecture in order to integrate
smart and heterogeneous things and components.
The second group of IoT projects deals with the design of innovative communication protocols for IoT. For example, SNAIL [261]
proposes a network platform fully compatible with the IETF standards, enabling smart objects to communicate seamlessly one
another, while EPCSN [262] aims at developing wireless sensor
networks like EPC systems. The ICSI project [263] focuses on Intelligent Transport Systems (ITSs) and proposes intelligent solutions
for communication protocols, advanced sensing, and distribution
of context-data to enable advanced trafc and travel management
strategies. A subset of projects deals with cross-layer communication challenges. For example, CALIPSO [264] focuses on energy efciency and network lifetime increase by proposing solutions
spread at the network, routing and application levels. Conversely,
other projects focus on a single network layer, such as GAMBAS
[265], OPENIOT [266] and SmartIoT-SSC [267]. Specically, GAMBAS focuses on open source and adaptive middlewares for enabling
utilization of behavior-driven services, OPENIOT on the dynamic

Fig. 9. Taxonomy of IoT projects active and completed all around the world.

formulation of self-managing cloud environments, and SmartIoTSSC on spontaneous service composition for smart IoT.
The last group of projects aims to develop software frameworks
that can be directly used and tested by users. This is the case of
ELLIOT [268], where users/citizens can test the platform and join
in the creation, exploration, experimentation of novel IoT ideas,
applications and services. Similarly, SmartSantander [269] focuses
on creating an experimental facility for a smart city in order to
research and test architectures, key enabling technologies, services
and applications (e.g., control and management of environmental/
building parameters, of gardens, of parks, of different sensors and
mobile devices). SPRINT [270] provides a platform to connect the
software tools used by the industrial companies within the project
and to allow integration of different sub-systems at the design
level. Conversely, the platform developed in PLANET [271] is
designed for maintaining and testing heterogeneous and largescale networks, with particular attention to biological reserves
and aireld scenarios.
7.2. Industrial perspective
As explained in Section 1, the potentialities of IoT are limitless
and the economic value associated with IoT is expected to
produce a fast GDP increase. Therefore, industrial and business
priorities are deeply affected by this emerging paradigm. This section aims at providing an overview of the industrial perspective
on the IoT, highlighting those areas considered the most attractive
and where industrial companies are making signicant capital
investments.6 In Section 4 we have seen the huge variety of envisioned IoT applications, spanning in nearly every eld. However,
the emerging trend indicates that, in the medium term, the industry
will focus its effort mainly in one sector: the Smart City domain
(see Section 4.2). Indeed, industry believes that the development
of innovative and practical solutions promoting sustainable and
secure cities is the key to be competitive in the market. Specically,
the three main areas of interest are: (i) smart grid, (ii) smart building, and (iii) smart home. Fig. 10 summarizes the main industrial
priorities and provides some examples of commercial solutions
for each area.
7.2.1. Smart grid
As discussed in Section 4.2.2, a number of technological transformations changed radically the energy distribution system in
the last decade. The electric grid, conceived at the beginning as a
centralized unidirectional system, is now turning into a high distribution system, referred to as smart grid, where users can consume
but also generate the power. Such process is leading to a signicant
increase of efciency in the electricity transmissiondistribution
control chain, as well as to a reduction of CO2 emissions. For
example, it is envisaged that a 5% improvement of the US grid is equivalent to cut CO2 emission of 53 millions cars [272]. To meet the
performance targets set by major countries, under their research
and development plants on smart grids (see, for example, Europe
20-20-207 [273,274], and US DoE Smart Grid Research and Development Program8 [275]), major industries are making massive investments to allow the convergence of three different networks: (i) the
energy network (e.g., electricity, gas, heat), (ii) the physical network
(e.g., roads, train tracks, water), and (iii) the communication network
6
Contributions for this section come from a number of different IoT workshops
(e.g., ETSI M2M Workshops, IEEE-SA IoT Workshops, M2M Forum).
7
The 20-20-20 EU objectives for 2020 are: (i) a 20% reduction in EU greenhouse
gas emissions from 1990 levels, (ii) a 20% improvement in the EUs energy efciency,
and (iii) a 20% of EU energy production from renewable resources.
8
The US objectives for 2030 are: (i) a 20% reduction in the US peak energy demand,
(ii) a 100% availability for manage critical loads, (iii) a 40% improvement in system
efciency, and (iv) a 20% of energy capacity coming from renewal sources.

E. Borgia / Computer Communications 54 (2014) 131

21

Fig. 10. Key industrial IoT priorities and examples of commercial products.

(e.g., ber, wireless, 4G). Examples of developed Smart Grids are

available, worldwide. Among them, it is worth remembering the earliest (and still largest) example of a smart grid that is installed by
Enel S.p.A. of Italy, named Telegestore.9 The project started in
2001, when the company replaced old electromechanical meters
with electronic smart meters, installing 32 million of them in only
ve years. Today, the Enel smart grid is composed of smart meters,
data concentrator devices and a remote metering management system. Telegestore can count on such large infrastructure to perform
bidirectional communication to remotely read the consumption of
its customers, remotely manage contractual operations and monitor
the quality of service. InovGrid10 by EDP Distribuio is a project
with the target to equip the rst urban area in Portugal with a smart
grid. In addition to automate grid management, to improve service
quality, and to reduce operating costs, the project boosts the penetration of micro generation and electric mobility. Another ambitious
initiative will be realized in the city of Issy-lesMoulineaux, where
nine major industrial groups will create IssyGrid [276], the rst district smart grid in France. IssyGrid will consist in a large-scale smart
grid able to measure energy consumption in homes and buildings, to
manage renewable energy productions (e.g., solar panels, co-generation units, windmills) and energy storage devices, and to use information about consumption in order to identify incentive polices
for energy optimization. Additional services will be offered to citizens. Street lamps will be equipped with sensors and smart devices
to efciently manage the street lighting (thus consuming one third
less than traditional lamps), and the public street lighting network
will be turned into a digital network connected with Internet to provide new urban services, such as public loudspeaker, CCTV, assistance for the visually impaired, pollution readings, trafc control,
parking tolling, charging for e-vehicles. Examples of such commercial products are CityBox11 by Bouygues, Smart Street Lighting12
by Echelon, Intellistreet13 by Wired.
7.2.2. Smart building
The industry commitment towards sustainable building construction is another strategic industrial priority. This can be
achieved by working at two distinct levels: (i) making buildings
more energy-efcient, through a better control of their actual
9
http://www.enel.com/en-GB/innovation/smart_grids/smart_metering/telegestore/.
10
http://www.inovcity.pt/en/Pages/inovcity.aspx.
11
http://www.bouyguesenergiesservices.com/solutions/citybox.php#citybox.
12
https://www.echelon.com/applications/street-lighting/.
13
http://intellistreets.com/index.php.

power consumption and innovative technologies to produce

energy and reduce consumption and (ii) creating automated buildings where all services (e.g., re detection, HVAC, light, power,
access control, elevators) are connected and managed efciently
through an IP-based backbone. For example, the Green Building,
the new singular building in Turkmenistan by Bouygues Construction, is a notable example. A smart ceiling lighting xture, composed of an IP-based network of luminance and temperature
sensors, is used to reduce energy and light pollution. Moreover,
the presence of motorized shutters, which open automatically
according to inside/outside temperature, guarantees a comfortable
permanence also in area without air conditioning systems. A building management system could centralize metering of real time
water and energy consumption (e.g., heating, cooling, ventilation,
lifts, lighting) enabling to detect and adjust unusual consumption.
Another relevant example of smart building is the Smart Building
Solution by Echelon. Basically, it is composed of smart transceivers
embedded in building automation devices (e.g., sensors, thermostats, motion detectors, air handlers, and chillers), a smart server
controller connecting devices and controlling networks through
open protocols (e.g., LonWorks, BACnet, Modus), and an open operating system (OpenLNS) that facilitates resource management.
Important examples of buildings relying on such a platform are
the Louvre museum at Paris and Beijings Birds Nest stadium.
7.2.3. Smart home
Another important area is the smart home: the term home
refers to an eco-system of devices, home appliances and sub-systems, all interconnected and interacting one another. The main
challenge within this research area is to facilitate the communication between all heterogeneous devices and applications running
on them. Industry proposes new solutions and products that
include simple home energy monitoring, home automation, home
media services, home security and comfort to cite a few. Many
solutions focus on fostering a more rational electricity consumption at home, which in Europe accounts for 29% of the overall
energy consumption [277]. To achieve this, the interaction with
the grid becomes fundamental. The Smart Info device, developed
by Enel S.p.A. within the Energy@Home initiative,14 represents a
good example of a solution to efciently interface the smart grid
and the electric home appliances. Such innovative device can be
plugged in every domestic appliance allowing their communication
to make them work only when their energy consumptions are low,
14

http://www.energy-home.it/.

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E. Borgia / Computer Communications 54 (2014) 131

Table 5
Standardization activities.
Standardization area

Organization

Main objectives

RFID

EPC global
STF 396 (CEN/CENELEC/
ETSI)
CEN TC 225 WP5
ETSI ERM TG 34, TG 28, TG
37
ISO/IEC JTC1/SC31 WG4,
WG6
ITU SG13, SG16

Data representation/storage, interface, communication protocols, discovery services

Data protection, information security, privacy

Sensors

IETF 6LoWPAN
ISO/IEC JTC1 WG7, WG4
ITU-T SG13, SG16

Adaptation layer for the IPv6-IEEE 802.15.4 interoperability

Architecture, application protocols, interoperability in hybrid RFID-sensor environment
USN, architecture for USN, service description for USN middleware, USN automatic location identication
capabilities

NFC

ISO/IEC JT1 SC 06, 17

ECMA TC47
NCF forum
GSMA NFC WG

Signaling interface, data protocol, NFC communication mode, security aspects

Same objects of ISO/IEC JT1 SC 06, 17
Architecture, data exchange protocol, logical link protocol
Mobile NFC integrated with SIM, handset and SIM requirements, interface

Communication
protocols

IEEE
3GPP
IETF
W3C EXI WG

VLC optical communication, broadband power line communication, multiple home networking technologies
Architecture, signaling congestion, network overload
IP interoperability, routing/application protocols for constrained resources
Efcient XML-based solutions

Privacy issues
Spectrum usage, tag interoperability
Data protocol, mobile RFID
Communication protocols, architecture, multimedia information access

Table 6
Objectives of the most important standardization WGs/initiatives established recently focusing on IoT as a whole.
Organization

Objectives

ITU-T JCA IoT

ISO/IEC JT1 SWG WG5
CEN TC 225 WG6
ETSI TC M2M
TIA R-50
ATIS M2M Committee
IEEE 802.16 M2M TG
OMA M2M
CCSA TC10
ARIB M2M Study Ad Hoc Group
TTA M2M PG
oneM2M

Networking aspects, identication, USN

Identication of IoT-related market requirements, standardization gaps
Identication technologies, data gathering protocols, and communication protocols
M2M e2e network reference architecture, identication, addressing, security, privacy
Ubiquitous protocols for industrial smart devices communications
Service layer and interfaces towards application and transport layers
IEEE 802.16 improvements to support M2M applications
Device management extension, location services
Green community, vehicle communication systems, e-health monitoring
Smart grid, smart cities, smart home
Service requirements, data structure, identication
M2M service layer platform, service architecture, resource/data access protocols and management, security, privacy

and allowing users to consult information available on the smart

meter. Other solutions focus on the development of smart gateways
that, in addition to maximize the home efciency, provide entertainment services. The main challenge here is to design a solution to
limit the number of smart boxes within the home. To active this,
the smart gateway, if possible based on an open platform, has to
implement a number of different features within the same device
and it has to interface with many different communication technologies. Shaspa Bridge by Shaspa, In-home gateway by STMicroelectronics, Control4 by Control4 are examples of gateways that allow
users to have a clear view of the energy home consumption. In addition, they allow to interact and manage remotely any home devices
and appliances. Although, currently, the gateway represents a fundamental IoT building block and the enabler for new IoT services, in a
long term view it will lose its importance and will disappear,
because everything will be connected though virtualization in the
cloud. Each physical object will be virtualized in the cloud, so that
the IoT will be seen as a virtual continuum of real objects and their
representations, and the cloud will facilitate users to access
resources and create their own applications.
Security is a hot topic in IoT industries. The focus is mainly on
data privacy and how to guarantee robustness and integrity of

the IoT system. The robustness and the integrity are a complex
problem because the system can be under attack at different levels.
For example, concerning the hardware level, it has been shown
that open OS platforms are subject to malware (e.g., Android is
the target of 92% of detected malware [278]). Moreover, many
attacks are possible to software failures. In the industry vision,
usage of SIM cards represents a valid starting point. SIM is turning
into a Secure Element (SE) where hardware and software are
designed to be robust and secure. For example, the new SIM generation is composed of a MCU (ARM Secure Care) and a Crypto Coprocessor to crypto data, assuring highly stability to SE platforms.
A usability example is the Octo Telematics project,15 where SEs
offer services for car insurance (e.g., pay-as-you-drive, green car
insurance, whose policy depends on the personal CO2 emissions),
for real trafc monitoring, for smart vehicle tracking. Advantages
of using SEs in IoT are manifold. Among them, notable are: (i) secure
connection (e.g., at routing level, at e2e level), (ii) data security (i.e.,
message cryptography, data integrity), (iii) secure remote management (e.g., application verication, application loading, remote management), and (iv) safe storage.

15

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E. Borgia / Computer Communications 54 (2014) 131

Another important issue for industries is to understand how

monetizing IoT services. A common understanding is that the main
value resides in data and not in the connection. Data opens opportunities for business. Indeed, IoT data is owned by users, who
decide to share it or not. Therefore, traditional business models
are not directly applicable, but novel ones should be proposed.
Standardization is another key IoT topic. There is a general
industrial agreement that, for a massive spread of IoT, a lot of standardization challenges need to be solved. Issues about data format,
data interfaces, protocols, service platform, and architecture are
some examples. In Section 7.3 we will carefully discuss the main
standardization activities.
7.3. Standardization
The past years are characterized by an intense increase of standardization activities connected with IoT. Indeed, the main effort is
to avoid excessive fragmentation of solutions, and to dene standards for interoperable solutions. To this aim, a number of bodies
and alliances have launched standardization activities on IoT. Some
of them (such as EPCglobal Inc, IEEE, IETF, 3GPP, IPSO Alliance,
ATIS, CCSA, OMA, and NIST) are focused on technologies, addressing sensing and communication issues, while others (such as ETSI,
IEEE-SA, and the just launched global oneM2M initiatives) consider
IoT as a whole, addressing standardization of the service architecture, of its components, and the related interactions. Tables 5 and 6
provide a list of the main standardization activities, which will be
presented in the remainder of this section.
7.3.1. RFID standardization
Concerning to RFID technologies, the joint-venture organization
between GS1 and GS1 US, named EPCglobal Inc, leads the EPC
standardization to spread the use of RFIDs. Specically, EPCglobal
Inc has dened a number of standards related to RFID data
(e.g., TDS [16], TDT [279]), which oversee the EPC representation
and the rules to include data on the EPC tag itself, and the security
functions distributed across the EPCglobal Network using the
X.509 certicate [280]. Further activities cover location service
standards. For example, Object Name Service (ONS) [169] represents a system to locate metadata and services associated with a
given EPC, while EPC Information Services (EPCIS) [281] is used
to enable all the enterprises involved in the EPCglobal Network
to know the EPC-objects position and to share the EPC-related data.
Other specications address the standardization of communication
protocols at low frequency (13.56 MHz) [282] and at high frequency (860960 MHz) [283]. Standards on discovery services
are currently under development.
In Europe, RFID standardization activities started as a result of
mandate M/436 issued by European Commission in 2009 to the
three major SDOs (i.e., CEN, CENELEC, and ETSI), who set up a Specialist Task Force (STF), named STF 396, to develop common guidelines for RFID implementation. The mandate addresses data
protection, privacy and information security aspects of RFID. In
addition, CEN TC 225 WP 5 mainly focuses on RFID privacy issues,
while ETSI ERM TG 34, TG 28 and TG 37 focus on several RFID
aspects including a more efcient spectrum usage in the range
[9 kHz to 40 GHz], the coexistence among RFID devices and EGSM-R, and the interoperability among tags manufactured by different vendors.
ISO and IEC formed two working groups within the subcommittee 31, named WG4 and WG6, respectively. The former develops a
data protocol between RFID reader and RFID tag [284,285], while
the latter investigates Mobile RFID technologies (e.g., mobile
phones equipped with RFID interrogator). Specically, the main
WG6 objective is to extend existing methodologies and protocols
for static RFIDs to the mobile RFIDs (i.e., MAC protocols, collision

23

avoidance/arbitrary schemes, security, and privacy aspects)

[286,287].
ITU SG13 and ITU SG16 are responsible for studying networking
aspects, architecture and multimedia information access for the
support of applications and services using tag-based identications
[288292].
7.3.2. Sensor network standardization
The majority of sensor-network standardization activities is
carried out within IEEE TC on Sensor Technologies, IEEE WG for
WPAN, IETF 6LoWPAN, and ZigBee Alliance. Another part is covered by ISO/IEC JTC1, which formed WG7 in 2009, to standardize
a reference architecture for sensor networks (i.e., Sensor Network
Reference Architecture SNRA) able to interface heterogeneous
environments (e.g., smart grid systems) and collaborative information processing services. To this end, a number of standards, such
as ISO/IEC 29182 [293], ISO/IEC 20005 [294], and ISO/IEC 30101
[295], have been proposed. In addition, ISO/IEC JTC1 WG4 studies
rules and functions (mainly application protocols) to manage sensors when operating in conjunction with passive and active RFID
tags [296]. ITU is also working on this area, carrying out several
activities on Ubiquitous Sensor Networks (USN). Specically,
ITU-T SG13 and ITU-T SG16 aim at establishing functional requirements and architectures for supporting USN applications and
services, service description for USN middleware, and USN automatic location identication capabilities [297300]. In addition,
ITU-T SG 17 contributes to dene secure solutions for secure
technologies, middleware, and routing [301303].
7.3.3. NFC standardization
Concerning NFC technology, the major actors are ISO/IEC JT1
subcommittees 06 (SC06), ISO/IEC JT1 subcommittees 17 (SC17),
and ECMA TC47. They specify the signaling interface and a set of
protocols (i.e., radio frequency interface, initialization, anti-collision and data protocol) for NFC, named NFCIP-1 (see ISO/IEC
18092 [304] and ECMA-340 [305]), and the mechanism to detect
and select the NFC communication mode, named NFCIP-2 (see
ISO/IEC 21481[306] and ECMA-352 [307]). In addition, they work
on security aspects by dening a protocol stack, named NFC-SEC,
that enables (application independent) encryption functions on
the data link layer, on top of NFCIP-1 (see ISO/IEC 13157-1 [308],
ISO/IEC 13157-2 [309], ECMA-385 [310] and ECMA-386 [311]).
Another major actor, who drives the NCF standardization, is the
NCF Forum. It focuses on NFC specications for a modular architecture that ensures interoperability between different NFC tag providers and NFC device manufactures. To this aim, a number of
technical specications have been dened: (i) NFC Data Exchange
Format (NDEF), (ii) Tag Type Operation, (iii) Record Type Denition
(RTD), (iv) Logical Link Control Protocol (LLCP), and (v) NDEF
Exchange Protocol. In 2006, also GSMA approached the NFC area
by forming a NFC Working Group focusing on mobile NFC integrated with SIM. The use of mobile phones, where NFC chips are
embedded into SIM cards, enables a set of new digital services,
such as ticketing on public transport systems, and payment systems similar to credit-card systems. To this aim, GSMA worked
on the denition of handset and SIM requirements to ensure security features, and on common APIs to guarantee portability across
many different handsets.
7.3.4. Communication protocol standardization
IEEE is the main contributor for the standardization of physical
and MAC layers for IoT.
Recently, with the advances in LED technologies that allow
intensity modulating of LED lights, there has been a renewed interest towards optical technologies for short-range. Specically, IEEE
802.15 TG 7 is in charge of writing standards to transmit data over

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E. Borgia / Computer Communications 54 (2014) 131

short-range wireless optical links using the visible light [312]. Visible light communications (VLCs) guarantee high data rate communications at short distance (up to 96 Mbps, 3 m), with 300 THz
of available visible light spectrum at low power and cost. They are
also immune to electromagnetic interference and non-interfere
with Radio Frequency (RF) systems. IEEE is also involved in developing standards for smart grid and home area networking. For
instance, the IEEE 1901 Broadband over Power Line (BPL) standard
[313] is designed for a wide range of applications including smart
energy, smart transportation and Home Area Networks, allowing
rate up to 500 Mbps. Conversely, IEEE 1901.2 [314] refers to power
line communications (PLCs) for low frequency and low data rate
(less than 500 kHz, 500 kbps). The major use is for smart grid applications (e.g., smart metering) and e-vehicle charging (at the station), but it can be also used in combination with lighting or
solar panels. The standard also provides security functions. In
2012, IEEE launched the IEEE 802.24 Smart Grid Technical Advisory
Group (TAG), which focuses on the use of IEEE 802 standards in
smart grid applications. IEEE 1905.1 [315] is another interesting
standard designed specically for convergent digital home network. It provides an abstraction layer for multiple home networking technologies to support dynamic interface selection for packets
transmission, e2e QoS and secure congurations (see Fig. 11). Currently, it works mainly with proprietary technologies (i.e., Powerline communication, Ethernet, WiFi, and MoCA 1.1), but it is
extendable to other home networking technologies.
Another major actor in the standardization of communication
protocols is 3GPP, which mainly focuses on how cellular networks
can support machine-type communications (MTC). Specically, in
Release 10, the 3GPP System Architecture WG 2 addresses the
rst and last mile problem, and denes network improvements
in UMTS and LTE core networks by addressing the MTC signaling
congestion and network overload (see also Section 6.1).
Signicant contributions at higher layers (layer 3 and above) are
produced within the IETF 6LoWPAN WG, whose main objective is
to allow the IP protocol to efciently work on smart constrained
devices (see Section 6.2). The WG was originally conceived to guarantee the IP interoperability on IEEE 802.15.4. Recently, standardization activities include solutions allowing other technologies
(e.g., Wavenis and PLC) to use the same 6LoWPAN mechanisms.
Further standardization activities is carried out under IETF ROLL
WG, which focuses on routing issues over low power and lossy networks by proposing the RPL routing protocol (see Section 6.4), and
under the IETF CoRE WG, whose main objective is to realize the
REST architecture to support resource-oriented applications. Specically, CoRE is currently proposing the Constrained Application
Protocol (CoAP) [191] (see Section 6.4). Other interesting standardization activities aim at providing very compact representations of
languages that can be described by a grammar (e.g., XML, Java,
HTTP, etc.) to simultaneously optimize performance and the utilization of computational resources. For instance, W3C EXI WG
investigated alternative XML forms developing the Efcient XML
Interchange (EXI) format [316]. EXI uses a grammar-based
approach that encodes the most likely alternatives of an XML document in fewer bits and a small set of datatype representations.

Fig. 11. IEEE 1905.1.

While it is optimized specically for XML, it may work also with

any other languages.

7.3.5. IoT standardization

The need to look at the IoT paradigm as a whole to speed up its
diffusion resulted also in the establishment of a number of new
WGs focusing only on IoT, as shown in Table 6. For instance, at
the international level, ITU-T launched a Joint Coordination Action
(JCA) on IoT with the scope of coordinating the whole ITU-T work
on IoT including networks aspects of identication of things, and
ubiquitous sensor network (USN) [317320]. The ISO/IEC JT1 counterpart established WG5 with the purpose of identifying IoTrelated market requirements and standardization gaps. At the
European level, CEN launched the TC 225 WG6 focusing on identication technologies, data gathering protocols, and communication protocols. Conversely, ETSI is more oriented on M2M
standardization activities. To this aim, as deeply explained in Section 6.1, the ETSI TC M2M has been established to develop an e2e
architecture and protocols for M2M.
In North America several associations and standard organizations are very active in promoting IoT standards:
 TIA (Telecommunications Industry Association) formed Engineering Committee TR-50 on Smart Device Communication,
specifying ubiquitous protocols for communicating with smart
devices used in industries and releasing its Smart Device Communications Reference Architecture standard (TIA-4940 [321]).
 ATIS (Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions)
launched the M2M committee to dene a common service layer
for multiple M2M applications and the correspondent interfaces
among the application and the transport layer(s).
 IEEE established the IEEE 802.16 WG M2M TG aimed at studying IEEE 802.16 improvements (i.e., IEEE 802.16p, IEEE 802.16b)
to support M2M applications. Basically, it investigates efcient
ways to support low power consumption at the device, a significant large number of devices at the base stations, small burst
transmissions, and improved device authentication.
 OMA (Open Mobile Alliance) is interested in extending the wellestablished device management protocol to M2M communications (e.g., LWM2M, DM Gateway supporting M2M networks
for constrained cellular and other M2M devices, DM security
enhancements), and in working on location services for mobile
M2M applications.
The standardization of IoT and M2M is an important theme in
Asia, too. In China, the IoT standardization is driven by CCSA Technical Committee 10 (TC10), which works mainly in the areas of
green community, vehicle communication systems, and e-health
monitoring. The Japanese ARIB established the M2M Study Ad
Hoc Group focusing on standardization for smart grid, smart cities
and smart homes, while the Korean TTA founded M2M PG (PG708)
working at service requirements, data structure, and identication
scheme.
As discussed above, a huge number of standardization activities
looking at the IoT paradigm as a whole have started, however they
still remain highly fragmented among the individual bodies. To
boost the global IoT market, a further collaboration effort and an
effective interaction of standardization organizations is mandatory. This is required to reduce standardization overlap and the risk
of lack of interoperable solutions. An example in this direction is
the oneM2M16 initiative, which is considered the evolution of ETSI
TC M2M into a global partnership project. In July 2012, seven SDOs
(i.e., ARIB, ATIS, CCSA, ETSI, TIA, TTA, and TTC) have agreed to create
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E. Borgia / Computer Communications 54 (2014) 131

a global harmonization group to ensuring the most efcient deployment of M2M communications systems. The oneM2M objective is to
develop e2e specications for the development of a common M2M
Service Layer platform, which works with different hardware and
software and is able to connect the myriad of IoT devices. Activities
within oneM2M include: a Service Layer platform, a Service Architecture, open/standard interfaces, protocols to access resources,
security and privacy enforcement (e.g., authentication, encryption,
integrity verication), application discovery services, data collection
for billing and statistical purposes, identication and naming of
objects, management aspect (i.e., object and data management).
8. IoT emerging research directions
So far we have analyzed and discussed the main challenges that
the international community is facing to make the IoT paradigm a
reality. We have also provided an overview of the industrial perspective highlighting which are the strategic priorities for industries. Obviously, the above discussion, although extensive, cannot
be considered exhaustive. In this section, we complement it by
providing a brief overview and discussion with two other important networking and computing paradigms: social networks and
context-aware computing.
8.1. IoT and social networks
The use of the social network paradigm in the IoT context can
open new possibilities of interaction among smart objects. The main
idea is that objects may have a social consciousness and may exhibit
social behaviors allowing them to build their own social network of
objects [322]. This social network of objects can be exploited to
enhance the trust level between objects that are friends, to guarantee a higher network navigability, and to make applications and
services more efcient. Indeed, if objects share information about
their provided services, service discovery may exploit the social network of friends to search information, thus becoming manageable
and avoiding the usage of those discovery mechanisms generally
used in Internet that are not able to scale with the envisioned multitude of IoT devices. It is envisaged that the realization of the above
vision goes through three different stages, corresponding to the
three distinct levels of social involvement of the objects [322]. The
rst step relies on exploiting humans, and their social network relationships, to share the resources offered by smart things. By using
different web protocols and communication paradigms, objects
may communicate with the human social network (e.g., posting
information about their status) but not with other objects. SenseShare [323] is an example where users may share data gathered by
their smart objects with friends through the use of Facebook only,
while in [324] several social networks can be exploited for data sharing. Users may choose, for each device, the social network for sharing
data and may allow other users to use their devices. In addition, the
automatic publishing of device messages on personal prole is
allowed. In the second step, objects have interaction with the environment and exhibit pseudo-social behaviors with objects. For
example, in [325] devices are allowed to establish temporary relationships, which, however, are still controlled by their owner.
Finally, social objects, i.e., objects that take part and actively form
a social network of objects, represent the last step. In [326328],
authors focus on the social relationships that may be established
in the social network of objects (named Social Internet of IoT (SIoT)).
Such relationships are among objects rather than their owners.
Objects may become friends and may form social groups autonomously, for the benets of human but without their intervention.
Inspired by social human interactions, authors dene ve types of
relationships among objects: (i) parental objects relationship

25

(POR) established among similar objects that are produced

in the same period and by the same manufacturer, (ii) co-location
objects relationship (C-LOR) established among objects located
always in the same place, (iii) co-work objects relationship (C-WOR)
established among objects that periodically cooperate for a
service/application, (iv) owner objects relationship (OOR) established
among objects associated to the same user, and (v) social objects
relationship (SOR) established among those objects that come in
contact by chance, mainly because their owners meet for personal
reasons. These relationships may be static and not change over
time (e.g., POR), or may evolve towards complex social structures
(e.g., C-WOR, SOR). Authors also propose a system architecture that
incorporates the features required for the SIoT realization, and
analyze the social structure. They observe that statistically exists a
correspondence between geographical distance among nodes
and the type of relationship that links them. In addition, they
investigate which are the social rules and structures that mainly
characterize objects in SIoT.
8.2. IoT and context-aware computing
Context awareness has been exploited since the early 1990s by
various computing and communications paradigms (e.g., desktop
and web applications, mobile and ubiquitous computing and communications), and refers to any kind of information that can be
used to characterize the situation of an entity (e.g., a person, an
object, a place) [329]. Context awareness may provide a great support to process and store the Big Data, and to make their interpretation easier [330]. Another advantage associated with the use of
context will be the implementation of efcient services, such as
service discovery mechanisms. Indeed, IoT services run in a highly
dynamic environment composed of trillion of nodes that may
move, so that services may suddenly appear or disappear, at any
time. To this aim, information about objects features, its status,
its geographical location, and security data may be exploited to
enrich the knowledge on services and rene for instance the choice
of the most suitable provider. For example, in [331,332], authors
propose an efcient solution for distributing and retrieving services in the IoT environment. In the authors view, the rst step
needed for a rapid diffusion of the IoT is to decouple the name of
the object (i.e., its identier) from its physical location (i.e., locator), which in the classic Internet approach are instead tightly coupled through the IP address. The next step is then to enrich the
locator with context metadata, which can be of any type of information that can be used at any level, forming the so-called enriched
locator (e-locator). E-locators allow a better accessibility and
exploitation of the provided services. This is achieved by two different services: an e-locator distributing service and a lookup service. The former deals with efciently distributing the e-locators of
service providers, while the latter returns a list containing the elocators of those peers maintaining that particular service. By
checking this list, the subscribers application may choose the best
provider based on characteristics described by the e-locator and
according to device capabilities and user preferences. For example,
if the e-locator consists in a geographic location, the lookup service
may provide the list of the providers in the proximity of the subscriber, according to a desired level of accuracy (e.g., 1 km,
10 km). Both services (i.e., e-locator distribution and lookup) are
based on a non-structured P2P network, created and maintained
among high-capability devices (e.g., access network devices).
9. Conclusions
The proliferation of a new generation of objects, equipped with
embedded intelligence and communicating-actuating capabilities,

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E. Borgia / Computer Communications 54 (2014) 131

pushes towards a fast realization of the Internet of Things (IoT)

vision. According to this emerging paradigm, everything will be
seamlessly connected to form a virtual continuum of interconnected and addressable objects in a worldwide dynamic network.
The result will be a solid underlying structure on which users
may develop novel applications useful for the entire society.
In this paper, we have dened the fundamental characteristics
of IoT, describing the technologies involved in its realization as
well as the envisaged applications. In addition, we have discussed
the major challenges that need to be faced for supporting the IoT
vision, which cover with different research areas: architecture,
communication, addressing, discovery, data processing, data management, security and privacy, etc. A number of solutions aimed at
solving those challenges has been proposed, however they are not
exhaustive and do not cover all the various aspects. As a result,
many open issues still wait for suitable solutions. Moreover, we
have analyzed the industrial perspective by providing an overview
of the main attractive sectors and where industries are making
capital investments for the mid- and long-term. Finally, we have
reported some interesting activities that standardization bodies
have started recently specically on the IoT theme. Indeed, standardization is the key enabler for IoT to avoid fragmentation while
enabling interoperability of proposed solutions.
As IoT is an emerging paradigm, it is highly dynamic and continuously evolves. Although we have overviewed the main IoT
research area as well related IoT challenges, many other research
issues can be identied. For example, with the forthcoming advent
of nano-technology and the development of nanoscale devices,
innovative solutions tackling channel modeling, information
encoding, and communication protocols, are also required to allow
the integration of these nano devices into IoT [333].

Acknowledgments
This work was partly funded by the EC under the EINS (FP7FIRE 288021), MOTO (FP7 317959), EIT ICT Labs MOSES and
Reference Communication & Application Platform for Automotive
and ITS (Business Plan 2014) projects.

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