Internet of Anything

T he Internet of Things (IoT)1 is a network of networks in which a massive number of objects, sensors, or devices are connected through the ICT infrastructure to provide value-added services. The IoT connects people and things anytime, anyplace, with anything and anyone, ideally using any path or network and any service (although other definitions have also been proposed2). By 2020, 50 to 100 billion devices will be connected to the Internet,2 generating big data3 for analysis and knowledge extraction. Big data has no clear definition,3 but it isn’t wholly about size. Rather, it’s defined based on three primary characteristics, also known as the 3Vs: volume, variety, and velocity.4 Volume relates to the data’s size (terabytes, petabytes, or zettabytes). Variety refers to the type of data and its source (sensors, devices, social networks, the Web, mobile phones, and so on). Velocity means how frequently the data is generated (for instance, every millisecond, second, minute, hour, day, week, month, or year). It is widely believed that cloud computing provides a promising platform for storing and processing big data (see Table A in the Web extra at http://doi.ieeecomputersociety. org/10.1109/MITP.2015.34). Even though data collected by individual devices might provide insufficient information, aggregated data from numerous physical devices and virtual sensors can provide a wealth of knowledge for important application areas, including disaster management, customer sentiment analysis, smart cities, and bio-surveillance.2 Data collection and analysis in IoT applications has many objectives. q q M M q q M M qM