Internet of Things: From applications, challenges and standardization to Industry implementations

The Internet of Things that is defined as anything that can be accessible anytime and anywhere provides connectivity to different objects and sensors around us and which will enable the transfer of different data between these objects and devices. A thing in the Internet of Things can be any natural or man-made object that can be assigned an IP address with a capability to exchange date over a network. There is a huge number of applications of IoT to benefit users, such as health monitors, smart homes, connected cars etc. If everything around us is connected and information about these things that can contain sensitive information, e.g. health and other personal information, are collected then these networks become very important and must be able to provide a proper security and privacy. It is believed that by 2020 there will be over 50 billion things that could be connected to Internet. Internet of things are very much associated with M2M (machine to machine communication) that is identified as a technology that makes objects smart, like smart homes, smart utility meters etc. M2M actually is considered to be a subset of IoT and which is mainly used for difficult and dangerous tasks, e.g. nuclear plants, etc. The deployment of IoT has already started and is expected to transform the way we live. According to Gartner, a technology research company, the Internet of Things has just reached the deployment stage by early adopters and the full deployment is expected in over ten years. From an industry angle, this paper will examine the market and technical trends of Internet of Things, main applications that will be supported by this technology, key issues and challenges faced by the industry, standards activities around IoT and finally the implementation landscape