Over the last decade the term Internet of Things (IoT) has attracted attention by projecting the vision of a global infrastructure of networked physical objects, enabling anytime, anyplace connectivity for anything and not only for anyone. IoT refers to a world where physical objects and beings as well as virtual data and environments, all interact with each other at the same space and time.
By Evangelos A. Kosmatos, Nikolaos D. Tselikas and Anthony C. Boucouvalas
Over the last decade the term
Internet of Things (IoT) has attracted attention by projecting the vision of a
global infrastructure of networked physical objects, enabling anytime, anyplace
connectivity for anything and not only for anyone. IoT refers to a world where
physical objects and beings as well as virtual data and environments, all
interact with each other at the same space and time.
IoT was initially inspired by
members of the RFID development community, who referred to the possibility of
discovering information about a tagged object by browsing an internet address
or database entry that corresponds to a particular RFID. In this way,
real-world everyday objects acquire unique digital identities and can then be
integrated into a network as well as be associated with digital information or
services. Everyday objects include not only the electronic devices we encounter
and use daily and technologically advanced products such as equipment and
gadgets, but “things” that we do not normally think of as electronic at all—
such as food, clothing, and furniture; materials, parts, and equipment;
merchandise and specialized items; landmarks, monuments and works of art; and
all the miscellany of commerce, culture and sophistication.
A very recent survey on the IoT states
that unquestionably, the main strength of the IoT idea is the high impact it
will have on several aspects of everyday life and behavior of potential users.
From the point of view of a private user, the most obvious effects of the IoT
introduction will be visible in both working, domestic and entertainment
fields. In this context, independent living, enhanced learning and
entertainment, e-health and automotive are only a few examples of possible
application scenarios in which the new paradigm will play a leading role in the
near future.
Similarly, from the perspective of
business users, the most obvious effects of the IoT deployment will be visible
in fields such as, intelligent manufacturing, logistics, retail, supply chain
management, product lifecycle management, reliable and safe transportation of
people and goods.The aforementioned potentialities and perspectives of IoT are
considered highly challenging by the US National Intelligence Council (NIC),
which includes IoT in the list of six ‘‘Disruptive Civil Technologies” with
potential impacts on US national power NIC foresees that ‘‘by 2025 Internet
nodes may reside in everyday things—food packages, furniture, paper documents,
and more”. It underlines the major opportunities that will emerge, starting
from the attitude that ‘‘popular demand combined with technology advances could
drive widespread diffusion of an IoT that could, like the present Internet,
contribute invaluably to economic development”.
RFIDs:
In this direction, several research
activities focus on linking tens of thousands of sensor networks using a
convergence of technologies that will allow companies and individuals to keep
track of every physical item on earth at every moment. The above as well as
several similar studies envisage an IoT architecture, the potentialities of
which are inevitably limited by the dichotomy imposed by RFID nature, i.e. the
heterogeneity between the plain and passive RFID tags and the networked RFID
readers. In order to overcome this restriction, some researchers are working
towards an alternative architectural model for the IoT as a loosely coupled,
decentralized system of smart objects—that is, autonomous physical/digital
objects augmented with sensing, processing, and network capabilities.
As mentioned above,
the network of sensors based upon the convergence of various technologies will not
only allow companies and individuals to keep track of every physical item on
earth at every moment, but at the same time going to spark the privacy and
security concerns. At this moment various projects are deployed to develop a
suitable framework for RFID integration, which are as follows:
- The ASPIRE research project, which aims at lowering software and integration costs associated with RFID deployment. To that end, ASPIRE is developing a lightweight, programmable, standards-compliant, integrated and privacy-friendly RFID middle-ware platform, along with a range of tools intended to facilitate RFID deployment.
- The BRIDGE research project, which configures a set of research, development and implementation tools to enable the deployment of RFID related applications taking into consideration the technical, social and educational challenges.
- The Perci framework, which integrates Web services and Physical Mobile Interaction (PMI) with tagged objects for everyday use. In the authors developed a suite of Web-based, user-level tools and applications designed to empower users by facilitating their understanding, management and control of personal RFID data.
Smart
Objects:
In order to
overcome this restriction, some researchers are working toward an alternative
architectural model for the Internet of Things as a loosely coupled,
decentralized system of smart objects—that is, autonomous physical/digital
objects augmented with sensing, processing, acting and network capabilities. In
contrast with passive RFID tags, smart objects carry chunks of application
logic that allow them to make sense of their local situation and interact with
human users and other nearby smart objects. They sense, log, and interpret what
is occurring within themselves and the world, act on their own,
intercommunicate with each other, exchange information with people and discover
where they are, which other objects are in their vicinity and what happened to
them in the past.
The idea of
smart objects and the IoT was recently popularized by Sterling. Sterling
coined the term spime to describe a new category of space-time, location-aware,
environment-aware, self-logging, self-documenting, uniquely identified objects
that provide a lot of data about themselves and their environment.
According to
Sterling, one could track the entire existence of an object, from the time
before it was made (its virtual representation), through its manufacture, its
ownership history, its physical location, to its eventual obsolescence and
breaking-down back into raw material to be used for new instantiations of
objects. In authors envisage IoT as a composition of smart objects that can
understand and react to their environments. Through practical experimentation
and by prototyping some generations of smart objects, authors identified three
canonical smart object types:
- Activity-aware objects,
- Policy-aware objects,
- Process-aware objects.
They also
identified the smart-object design space as a space of three dimensions:
Awareness, representation and interaction. An architectural framework for
building smart object systems is described in the authors design an artifact
framework for representing smart objects and a pervasive application model to
leverage the services of smart objects dynamically. In a similar direction, the
Hydra middle-ware allows developers to incorporate heterogeneous physical
sensing devices into their applications by offering easy-to-use web service
interfaces for controlling any type of physical sensor devices irrespective of
its network technology. It also incorporates means for device and service
discovery, semantic model driven architecture and security.
The
Proposed Integrated Architecture
The proposed
IoT Architecture introduces a more generic IoT architecture by integrating both
the RFID and smart object-based infrastructures. In this framework, RFID tagged
objects will be considered to be objects supporting primitive functionalities,
while smart objects, as described in previous studies will be objects
supporting complex functionalities, resulting in a superset of objects. The
necessity of integration between different IoT architectures is imposed by two
facts:
1) RFID tags
are widespread among all aspects of daily life and furthermore, are cheap and
easily produced. Envisaging a future IoT without RFID tags and readers is
rather utopian.
2) The
research on nano-electronic devices and polymers electronics is used for
developing cheap, nontoxic and even disposable electronic sensors and objects
that include logic.
This
development will enable the production at low cost of smart objects which will
surpass their limited predecessors, RFID tags. A high-level approach of the
proposed IoT architecture is illustrated in Figure 1.
The innovation
of the proposed architecture originates from the initial consideration of IoT
integrated vision. The applications developed on an IoT architecture
compromised by RFID tags are limited to identification and tracking. The
integration of sensing and acting smart objects into passive RFID tags would
enable the integration of a lot of completely new applications into the IoT
context, spanning from sensor and automation specific applications to combined
inter-domain applications.
In the latest
book of the Cluster of European Research Projects on IoT, published in 2010, the
domains that will be accelerated by the implementation of applications adopting
the IoT concept are described in detail. The authors report that the domains
that will be highly affected by IoT datum will include: Automotive, intelligent
building, telecommunications, health-care, aerospace, aviation, independent
living, pharmaceutical, retail, logistics, supply chain management, product
life-cycle management, environmental monitoring, people and good transportation,
safety, security, privacy, agriculture and breeding, media and entertainment,
insurance and recycling.
In addition,
the integration of passive objects (RFID tags) with active objects (smart
objects) generates the potentiality of positioning chunks of application logic
to selective locations into the IoT framework. The RFIDs architecture
approach—limited by its nature—places logic into RFID reader and core
components (e.g. Servers on internet). On the other hand, smart objects
architecture approach tends to position application logic into local smart
objects. The proposed architecture enhances the “Service composition” procedure
with the potentiality of preselected or adhoc allocation of application logic
into the available building blocks of the IoT architecture. This flexibility
allows, firstly, the composition of different versions of the same application
according to different requirements and secondly, the formation of several ways
of application execution based on different parameter considerations:
Connectivity, granularity, resources, energy, mobility, network topology,
communication modality, flexibility and quality of service.
Another
innovation of the proposed middle-ware solution is that every object attached to
the middle-ware is considered to have dual nature. On the one hand, it is
characterized by its participation to a worldwide infrastructure of networked
things. On the other hand, it is described by its social representation.
Objects are able to form online communities, participate in one or more social
networks and act as blogjects. The proposed architecture enables the creation
and management of “social networks of things” composing the “Social Internet of
Things”. The purposes of the creation may be variant: Creation of a “Grid of
Things” with sharable resources to accomplish tasks, creation of a “social
network of things” to expand the owners’ Web 2.0 social network, creation of a
“blogject community of things” which combines their knowledge to search for
specific insights and create blog posts, etc.
In this
context the proposed architecture is generic enough aiming not only to
integrate both architectures, but also to extend the social scope of IoT
building blocks from a local level to community, national and global levels respectively.
The objects of the final IoT infrastructure will become active participants in
the creation, maintenance and knitting together of social formations through:
1) The exploitation of similar characteristics
and context parameters,
2) The dissemination of meaningful insights
that, until now, were not easily circulated in human readable form.
Conclusion:
In the present
study a unified IoT architecture is proposed integrating the two major trends
in the area of IoT architectural models, while, in parallel, it exploits the
social aspect of participating objects. The RFID approach, despite its
simplicity and scalability, is inevitably restricted by the dichotomy of RFID
tags and RFID readers. The smart objects approach is applicable only to objects
supporting complex functionalities and therefore, limits the scope of IoT. The
proposed IoT architectural model introduces a more generic IoT architecture by
integrating both the RFID and smart object-based infrastructures. In this
framework, RFID tagged objects are considered to be objects supporting
primitive functionalities, while smart objects are objects supporting complex
functionalities resulting in a superset of objects. In addition, every object
attached to the infrastructure is considered to have dual nature. On the one
hand, it is characterized by its participation to a worldwide infrastructure of
networked things, while, on the other hand, it is described by its social
representation.
Future work
will mainly focus on;
1) evaluating the proposed infrastructure in terms of
scalability, adaptability and performance maximization,
2) extending the social
scope of the proposed architecture by studying the human-object interaction,
especially in social network environments.
About The Authors:
Evangelos A.
Kosmatos, Nikolaos D. Tselikas, Anthony C. Boucouvalas, Department of
Telecommunications Science and Technology, University of Peloponnese, Tripoli,
Greece.
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Publication Details:
An abridged article from Advances in
Internet of Things, Vol.1 No.1(2011), Article ID:4696,8 pages
DOI:10.4236/ait.2011.11002 / Title: Integrating
RFIDs and Smart Objects into a Unified Internet of Things Architecture / Download The Paper - LINK / Creative Common 3.0 License
