The Internet of Things or, as commonly referred to and now universally used, IoT has two keywords: things and Internet. The very idea of IoT consists allowing things to connect to the (existing) Internet, thus allowing the generation of information and, on the reverse, the interaction of the virtual world with the physical world. This book does not attempt to be an exhaustive treaty on the subject of IoT. Rather, it tries to present a broad view of the IoT based on the joint research activity at the University of Parma, mainly in the years between 2012 and 2015 (when all the authors were affiliated with the same Department of Information Engineering), especially in the context of the EU FP7 project CALIPSO (Connect All IP‐based Smart Objects!, 2012–2014). In particular, we present, in a coherent way, new ideas we had the opportunity to explore in the IoT ecosystem, trying to encompass the presence of heterogeneous communication technologies through unifying concepts such as interoperability, discoverability, security, and privacy. On the way, we also touch upon cloud and fog computing (two concepts interwoven with IoT) and conclude with a practical view on IoT (with focus on the physical devices). The intended audience of the book is academic and industrial professionals, with good technical skills in networking technologies. To ease reading, we have tried to provide intuition behind all presented concepts.
The contents of the book flow from a preliminary overview on the Internet and the IoT, with details on “classical” protocols, to more technical details. The synopsis of the book can be summarized as follows: The first chapter introduces IoT in general terms and illustrates a few IoT‐enabled applications, from home/building automation to smart farming. The second chapter contains an overview of relevant standards (e.g. Constrained Application Protocol, CoAP), presented according to the protocol layers and parallelizing the “traditional” Internet and the IoT, with a final outlook on industrial IoT. Chapter three focuses on interoperability, a key concept for IoT, highlighting relevant aspects (e.g. Representational State Transfer (REST) architectures and Web of Things) and presenting illustrative applications (e.g. the Dual‐network Management Protocol (DNMP) allowing the interaction of IEEE 802.11s and IEEE 802.15.4 networks). At the end of Chapter three, we preliminarily also discuss discoverability in constrained environments (with reference to the CoRE Link Format); this paves the way to Chapter four, which dives into the concept of discoverability (both in terms of service and resource discovery), presenting a few of our research results in this area. Chapter five is dedicated to security and privacy in the IoT, discussing proper mechanisms for IoT in a comparative way with respect to common mechanisms for classical Internet. In Chapter six, we consider cloud and fog computing, discussing concepts such as big stream processing (relevant for cloud‐based applications) and the IoT Hub (relevant for fog‐based applications). Finally, Chapter seven is an overview of hands‐on issues, presenting relevant hardware devices and discussing a Web‐of‐Things‐oriented vision for a test bed implementation.
We remark that the specific IoT protocols, algorithms, and architectures considered in this book are “representative,” as opposed to “universal.” In other words, we set to write this book mainly to provide the reader with our vision on IoT. Our hope is that this book will be interpreted as a starting point and a useful comparative reference for those interested in the continuously evolving subject of the IoT.
It is our pleasure to thank all the collaborators and students who were with us during the years of research that have led to this book, collaborating with the Wireless Adhoc and Sensor Networks (WASN) Lab of Department of Information Engineering of the University of Parma, which has lately been “rebranded,” owing to this intense research activity, as the IoT Lab at the Department of Engineering and Architecture. We particularly thank, for fundamental contributions, Dr. Laura Belli, Dr. Luca Davoli, Dr. Paolo Medagliani, Dr. Stefano Busanelli, Gabriele Ferrari, Vincent Gay, Dr. Jérémie Leguay, Mattia Antonini, Dr. Andrea Gorrieri, Lorenzo Melegari, and Mirko Mancin. We also thank, for collaborative efforts and useful discussions, Dr. Michele Amoretti, Dr. Francesco Zanichelli, Dr. Andrzej Duda, Dr. Simon Duquennoy, Dr. Nicola Iotti, Dr. Andrea G. Forte, and Giovanni Guerri. Finally, we express our sincere gratitude to Wiley for giving us the opportunity to complete this project. In particular, we are indebted to Tiina Wigley, our executive commissioning editor, for showing initial interest in our proposal; we are really indebted to Sandra Grayson, our associate book editor, who has shown remarkable patience and kindness, tolerating our delay and idiosyncrasies throughout the years of writing.
Parma, July 2018
Simone Cirani
Gianluigi Ferrari
Marco Picone
Luca Veltri