Internet of Things: Research challenges and Solutions

The past decade has witnessed a significant proliferation of Internet-capable devices. While its greatest commercial impact has been in the area of consumer electronics, with the smartphone revolution and the uptake of wearables, connecting humans is only part of a greater trend toward the interconnection of the physical world with the digital world.While the Internet is a communication network connecting people to information, the Internet of Things (IoT) is an interconnected ecosystem of uniquely addressable physical objects with varying degrees of sensing, processing, and actuation capabilities, sharing the ability to communicate and interoperate through the Internet as their common denominator [1].With the IoT paradigm, sensor-equipped devices can provide fine-grained information about the physical world, allowing cloud-based resources to extract value from such information and possibly make decisions to be implemented by actuator-equipped devices, blurring the line between the IoT and the broader concept of Cyber-Physical Systems [2], [3] and [4], which does not necessarily presuppose Internet connectivity per se.The vagueness of the term ?Things?makes it hard to define the ever expanding boundaries of the IoT, but at the same time offers a clear idea of its heterogeneity and its virtually limitless application potential. This has spawned very encouraging projections from market analysts and corporate players who envision a multi-trillion dollar market for the IoT.As commercial success materializes, the IoT continues to offer a seemingly boundless supply of opportunities for both business and research. This special issue of Computer Communications is dedicated to the latter, offering a varied collection of research contributions to cutting-edge themes within the IoT space. This special issue complements [5], which focused on architectures, protocols, and services