From mobile networks to the Internet of things – a thorough review
Over the past decade there has been a growing public fascination with the complex “connectedness” of modern society. One finds networks appearing in discussion and commentary on an enormous range of topics. The diversity of contexts in which networks are invoked is in fact so vast that it’s worth deferring precise definitions while recounting a few of the more salient examples.
Services designed over the Internet evolved depending on the needs identified from person-to-person interaction to meet other interactions, such as person-to-machine, machine-to-person and, lately, machine-to-machine where no human interaction is needed, building ubiquitous and pervasive computing. Such a computing system started a long time ago with the ambition of offering all-pervading computing to automate tasks and build a smart world. Introducing radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology in building new services over the network has pushed the “Internet of Things” (IoT) as a meeting point between the real world and the virtual world, especially when combined with other technologies, such as sensor technology or mobile communication.
IoT appears to be one step further on the path to ubiquitous computing, mainly due to the introduction of RFID and sensor technologies, but also other technologies such as robotics and nanotechnology. These technologies make the IoT services an interdisciplinary field where most of the human senses are somehow reproduced and replaced in the virtual world. In the long run, the IoT appears to be one of the leading paths to the future Internet since it challenges the current Internet model with new needs of object connectivity, in issues such as identification, naming and addressing, scalability, heterogeneity, resource limitation, new traffic modeling.
This work aims at providing a thorough review on the technologies emerged from the typical networks to the mobile networks and the internet of things that will drive innovation in the near future.