Preface
The Internet of Things is considered to be the next big opportunity, and challenge, for the Internet engineering community, users of technology, companies and society as a whole. It involves connecting embedded devices such as sensors, home appliances, weather stations and even toys to Internet Protocol (IP) based networks. The number of IP-enabled embedded devices is increasing rapidly, and although hard to estimate, will surely outnumber the number of personal computers (PCs) and servers in the future. With the advances made over the past decade in microcontroller, low-power radio, battery and microelectronic technology, the trend in the industry is for smart embedded devices (called smart objects) to become IP-enabled, and an integral part of the latest services on the Internet. These services are no longer cyber, just including data created by humans, but are to become very connected to the physical world around us by including sensor data, the monitoring and control of machines, and other kinds of physical context. We call this latest frontier of the Internet, consisting of wireless low-power embedded devices, the Wireless Embedded Internet. Applications that this new frontier of the Internet enable are critical to the sustainability, efficiency and safety of society and include home and building automation, healthcare, energy efficiency, smart grids and environmental monitoring to name just a few.
Standards for the Internet are set by the Internet Engineering Task ...
