Collaborative Internet Of Things (C-Iot) - For Future Smart Connected Life And Business

The trend toward increasing computer and network capabilities into an expanding number of devices and device types in our networks are creating an “Internet of Things (IoT)”. Consequently, this technology trend is driving the need to create Smart Network Gateways capable of unifying connectivity amongst these devices serving each premise with high-performance networking such as Ethernet LAN, 3G/4G broadband, 802.11 compliant Access-Points (APs), WLANs, G.hn, 802.15.4 ZigBee wireless sensor networks ( WSNs), and wired and wireless machine-to-machine (m2m) solutions. These new distributed processing and networked devices will provide sensing, data acquisition, adaptive real-time decision making, data distribution access, machine vision with real-time video analytics, and over time, an adaptable learning ability, each with an intent to help make our world safer, greener, and more secure. The impact is huge in terms of explosive growth of internet traffic, increase of broadband speed and the emergence of multimedia class of applications. This has led to the migration from client/server to cloud computing and services. Security has become and remains to be a key challenge to secure access of content at anytime and anywhere. The introduction of smart phones has generated a wide acceptance and adoption by business, consumer and general population. Today, we see high growth in mobile traffic than landline. Increase longer life battery, introduction of tablets and growth of ecosystem for mobile applications will cause a gradual decline in the growth of PCs and rapid end of life of desktop equipment.

The amount of data being created and transmitted over networks from mobile devices and IoT will continue to grow in an explosive way. This, in turn, will impact businesses by entering in a new era of computing that requires systems to process and analyze, in real-time, huge volumes of information known as Big Data and emergence of new applications and services. As networks increase in complexity, concept of virtualization and clouds become of great importance in the evolution of future networks. SDN – Software Defined Networks will enable virtualization of network resources enabled by open source capabilities and interoperability. Hence, we can witness the evolution and acceleration of the next generation cloud architecture, computing and emerging services.

The book provides the reader with a quick overview of the evolution of Internet of Things and its impact on Smart Connected Digital Life and emerging Cloud Services comparing trials in the 1990s with current solutions offering and future trends. The underline drivers of innovative change are the scalability of Internet, advancement of wireless technology and accelerated growth of mobility. Broadly, the book is organized into eight chapters and provides a comprehensive overview on emerging cloud services and IoT networking paradigms.

Fawzi Behmann
President, TelNet Management Consulting Inc., Texas, USA

Kwok Wu
Head, Embedded Software Development, Freescale Semiconductor, Texas, USA