The Internet of Things in the Cloud ─ A Middleware Perspective

Although the Internet of Things (IoT) is a vast and dynamic territory that is evolving rapidly, there has been a need for a book that offers a holistic view of the technologies and applications of the entire IoT spectrum. Filling this void, The Internet of Things in the Cloud: A Middleware Perspective provides a comprehensive introduction to the IoT and its development worldwide.

It gives you a panoramic view of the IoT landscape—focusing on the overall technological architecture and design of a tentatively unified IoT framework underpinned by Cloud computing from a middleware perspective. Organized into three sections, it:

1. Describes the many facets of Internet of Things—including the four pillars of IoT and the three layer value chain of IoT
2. Focuses on middleware, the glue and building blocks of a holistic IoT system on every layer of the architecture
3. Explores Cloud computing and IoT as well as their synergy based on the common background of distributed processing

The book is based on the author's two previous bestselling books (in Chinese) on IoT and Cloud computing and more than two decades of hands-on software/middleware programming and architecting experience at organizations such as the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, IBM, BEA Systems, and Silicon Valley startup Doubletwist. Tapping into this wealth of knowledge, the book categorizes the many facets of the IoT and proposes a number of paradigms and classifications about Internet of Things' mass and niche markets and technologies.

Honbo Zhou, Ph.D., is currently the general manager of Foton Fleet Telematics Co. Ltd. He was chief software scientist of TongFang Co. Ltd., executive director of the board and chief technology officer of Technovator Pte. Ltd., and chief operating officer of TongFang Software Co. Ltd. Dr. Zhou worked as a research associate on grid computing at Oak Ridge National Laboratory after receiving his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Zurich in 1993. He also worked at IBM, BEA Systems (now Oracle), and other companies in the United States as a senior engineer or manager. He participated in the ASCI Blue Pacific project building the world’s fastest supercomputer in 1996 while at IBM as a software team lead and coordinator for its job scheduler. He masterminded and built a high-performance/cloud-computing system that accomplished the complete annotation of the human genome for the first time in the world while working at a startup in Silicon Valley, which was reported by media such as the San Francisco Chronicle and CNN. He has been one of the pioneers of the Internet of Things and machine-to- machine computing, leading a team of 100-plus developers to build TongFang’s flagship ezM2M Middleware Platform for dozens of vertical IoT applications since 2003, and he has authored two related books in Chinese. He is a frequently invited speaker and evangelist of IoT and cloud computing, adjunct professor of several universities, and vice president of the Middleware Association, and he is a member of a few other related professional associations in China.