Internet of Things A to Z

3An Overview of Enabling Technologies for the Internet of Things

Faisal Alsubaei,^1,2 Abdullah Abuhussein,³ and Sajjan Shiva⁴

¹Computer Science Department, University of Memphis, Memphis, TN, USA

²Faculty of Computing and Information Technology, University of Jeddah, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

³Department of Information Systems, St. Cloud State University, St. Cloud, MN, USA

⁴Computer Science Department, The University of Memphis, Memphis, TN, USA

3.1 Introduction

The Internet of Things (IoT) initially utilized current Internet infrastructure and existing technologies to transform stand-alone objects (i.e., devices) into interconnected smart objects. Before the development of IoT-specific technologies, computers and networking technologies were applied, with major tweaks, to support IoT applications. For example, IPv4 that was used in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) was used extensively in the beginning of IoT to connect nodes to the Internet using one IP address (i.e., Network Address Translation (NAT)), which requires extra effort to setup. However, many issues emerged from the use of technologies that were not designed with IoT in mind (e.g., the lack of autoconfiguration in IPv4). As such, there was a need to develop new technologies to overcome various issues, such as efficient routing, scalability, and mobility, to make developing IoT applications easier and more efficient. These advancements in IoT technologies have resulted in extensive real-world deployment of IoT applications ...