The Internet of Things

Building on the Internet’s success story over the past decades, the Internet of Things will profoundly change how people consume information and interact with their immediate environments. This chapter introduces the Internet of Things as a paradigm in which not only human-to-human and human-to-machine communication, but also machine-to-machine communication between smart everyday objects occur over the Internet. Besides a brief definition and overview of the Internet of Things’ historical background in the early 1990s, several of its enabling technologies and basic concepts are also covered. Furthermore, this chapter also presents an overview of important architectural models of the Internet of Things put forward by researchers and practitioners. To conclude this introduction, this chapter deals with several common use cases of the Internet of Things, such as smart homes, smart cities, and the Industrial Internet of Things (with a specific focus on the implications for the energy and health care sectors), as well as important challenges to and potential future developments of the Internet of Things.