High-Density and De-Densified Smart Campus Communications

4Traditional Sensor Networks/IoT Services

This chapter provides a high‐level overview of the Internet of Things (IoT) field.¹, ² The basic concept of the IoT is to provide intelligent capabilities to monitor, collect, transmit, and process information generated by a large number of dispersed devices in order to support automated (machine‐to‐machine or people‐to‐machine) passive and/or active control of these devices or some aspects of their surroundings. The concept started to emerge in the early 1990s but has blossomed into a full‐fledged discipline since the mid‐2000s.

4.1 OVERVIEW AND ENVIRONMENT

Numerous definitions and descriptions of the IoT exist. One fundamental/descriptive quote from the author's previous work [1, 25] is as follows:

The basic concept of the IoT is to enable objects of all kinds to have sensing, actuating, and communication capabilities, so that locally‐intrinsic or extrinsic data can be collected, processed, transmitted, concentrated, and analyzed for either cyber‐physical goals at the collection point (or perhaps along the way), or for process/environment/systems analytics (of a predictive or historical nature) at a processing center, often “in the cloud”. Applications range from infrastructure and critical‐infrastructure support (for example, smart grid, smart city, smart building, and transportation), to end‐user applications such as e‐health, crowdsensing, and further along, to a multitude of other applications where only the imagination is ...