Special Issue on the Internet of Things and its Application

Internet of Things (IoT) is going to create a world where physical objects are seamlessly integrated into information networks in order to provide advanced and intelligent services for human-beings. The Internet of Things is a paradigm where everyday objects can be equipped with identifying, sensing, networking and processing capabilities that will allow them to communicate with one another and with other devices and services over the Internet to accomplish some objective. The Internet of Things (IoT) has recently received considerable interest from both academia and industry that are working on technologies to develop the future Internet. It is a joint and complex discipline that requires synergetic efforts from several communities such as telecommunication industry, device manufacturers, semantic Web, and informatics and engineering. The phrase Internet of Things (IoT) heralds a vision of the future Internet where connecting physical things, from banknotes to bicycles, through a network will let them take an active part in the Internet, exchanging information about themselves and their surroundings. This will give immediate access to information about the physical world and the objects in it—leading to innovative services and increase in efficiency and productivity. Much of the IoT initiative is supported by the capabilities of manufacturing low-cost and energy-efficient hardware for devices with communication capacities, the maturity of wireless sensor network technologies, and the interests in integrating the physical and cyber worlds. However, the heterogeneity of the “Things” makes interoperability among them a challenging problem, which prevents generic solutions from being adopted on a global scale. Furthermore, the volume, velocity and volatility of the IoT data impose significant challenges to existing information systems.