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The Internet of Things:
Here Now and Coming Soon
Geoff Mulligan
IPSO Alliance
A transformation is coming to the Internet that will enhance our personal lives and forge advances in energy conservation, healthcare, home safety, environmental monitoring, and countless other facets of our world.
The Internet of Things was first mentioned in work done at MIT in 1999 related to research into RFID tags. The concept was and is about connecting the physical world — things — to networks and tying them all together with the Internet. Vint Cerf, Google’s chief Internet evangelist, describes it this way: “The Internet of the future will be suffused with software, information, data archives, and populated with devices, appliances, and people who are interacting with and through this rich fabric” (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/next-internet.html).
Although it was just an idea when we entered this century, it’s now becoming a reality, and over the next decade, we’ll see things we never thought could be on the Internet getting connected, with profound impacts to computing, protocols, socialization, privacy, and our lives.
Smart Objects
Smart objects — any device that combines local processing power with communications capabilities — are a reality. For years, the idea of pushing IP (the Internet Protocol) into small 8- and 16-bit devices with tens of Kbytes of program storage and possibly operating on battery power was thought to be impossible: the code would be too big, the packets too large, and the protocol too heavy for these low-speed, low-power networks. IP implementations now exist that run on sub-$2 micro-controllers with as little as 16 Kbytes of flash memory and 4 Kbytes of RAM.
These IP stacks statelessly compress a 40-byte IPv6 header down to just 3 bytes, allowing the efficient transfer of packets even with batteryoperated RF, while still providing IP-level end-toend integrity and security, both of which are lost when using proprietary protocol-translation gateways. Within the next two years, as the power consumption of micro-controllers and embedded radios continues to decrease and the efficiency of batteries, photo-voltaics, and energy harvesting increases, we’ll see a crossover in which these wireless sensor devices will be “always on.”
Today
IP-based wireless sensor and control networks are deployed throughout the industry today.
More than one million IP-enabled electric meters deployed in 2009 now support automated
meter reading, and hundreds of thousands of streetlights are interconnected with IP-based
RF mesh networks to provide remote condition monitoring. IP-enabled temperature, humidity,
and motion sensors are now installed in office buildings and connected with existing IP infrastructure to augment building control systems.
IP- and RF-interconnected clocks are now used in hospitals to ensure precisely accurate times
for medical events. In August 2009, a 61-year-old woman had surgery to install an IP-connected
pacemaker; her doctors can now remotely check on her condition. Smart grid projects, energy
management systems, and telemedicine portend even more pervasive use of smart objects, especially IP smart objects, which are the building blocks for tomorrow’s Internet of Things.
Tomorrow
“When the parents are away, the children will play,” or so goes an old saying, but wouldn’t it be nice to know they’re safe while you’re away? New applications will allow appliances such as the stove to alert parents that they’ve been turned on (or were left on) and let you turn them off remotely. When you forget to turn off the lights, you can rectify that situation remotely. Smoke detectors will “talk” to
gas appliances to shut them off when an alarm sounds and then send an alert to your phone.
For people with parents far from home, appliances could watch for typical usage patterns (refrigerator door opening and closing, oven or microwave being used, and motion throughout the house) and message you if these events aren’t occurring as expected.
In addition to safety and security, the Internet of Things will mean enhanced convenience. Rather than needing to figure out how to heat a meal in the microwave, the microwave will read the RFID tag on the container and request heating instructions from the manufacturer via the Internet — all you’ll have to do is press “cook.”
When you check in at your hotel, your unique preferences will be sent to the room so that the temperature is correct, lights lit, and radio preprogrammed. Within your home, rather than having just a single temperature sensor (your thermostat), temperature sensors can be set throughout the house along with occupancy sensors to ensure that the rooms you actually use most stay at the requested temperature.
Parking spaces can send messages indicating availability either around the next corner or on the next level in a parking structure, all relayed to your phone via a streetlight network.
For eldercare and remote healthcare, you’ll find that you can take blood pressure or glucose levels with an IP smart object and have the results sent to your doctor securely and automatically
via an already installed home network.
Privacy With all this oversight and viewing into our daily affairs, we must be cognizant of the possibility of
technical and ethical abuse and the need to protect our privacy. Not only do we need to ensure
that security mechanisms and protocols are properly designed but also properly used and defined
for data usage and ownership. Who owns the information about home usage of appliances or
products — us, the utility, the appliance manufacturer, the warranty service company, or maybe
all of these, in various contexts? With motion sensors in our homes, cars, and phones able to
report our location, can a thief check to see if we’re home? Ethically, if our microwave reports
the foods we eat, should our doctor or insurance company know that we just ate an entire bag of
“theater butter” microwave popcorn? With these billions, or billions of billions, of
devices coming online, we must find ways to allow them to either be self-configuring or so
easily configured that anyone can do it. Mark Weiser, widely considered to be the father of
ubiquitous computing, said, “the most profound technologies are those that disappear … they
weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.”
Although the protocols of today such as stateless address auto configuration and 6lowpan help get
us closer, they don’t completely solve problems nor enable completely self-forming, self-healing
ad hoc networks. Additionally, these new Internet objects must be able to “learn” what servers
and services they can and, more importantly, should talk to. They must be able to advertise the
services and data that they can provide so that they can seamlessly participate in the Semantic
Web. New transport and application protocols and data formats must also be defined for these
embedded and nearly invisible devices.
T he enhanced connectivity between devices in the Internet of Things is expressly designed
to engage us in making informed decisions about creating a safer, greener, healthier, more efficient, and far less wasteful world. The Internet of Things will provide nearly limitless amounts
of information and a much higher granularity of measurement, but we need to be ready for
this explosion of data and control. Yesterday’s Internet = “anytime, anyplace, anyone.” Today’s
Internet = “anytime, anyplace, anything.”
Reference
1. “The Computer for the 21st Century,” Scientific Am., vol. 265, no. 9, 1991, pp. 66–75.