Paper Prepared for the 1st Berlin Symposium on Internet and Society October 25-27, 2011 The Internet of Things Rob van Kranenburg
[email protected] Erin Anzelmo
[email protected] Alessandro Bassi
[email protected] Dan Caprio
[email protected] Sean Dodson
[email protected] Matt Ratto
[email protected] 1 Abstract This paper traces the challenges and nature of the impact posed by the developments termed the ’Internet of Things (IoT)’. The Internet of Things is comprised of a number of technological protocols that aim to connect things to other things, to databases and to in- dividuals. The speed with which the paradigm of connecting communicating objects has taken over the full range of connectivity protocol (IPv6), hardware (from cheap sensors to smart phones, iPads, tablets that are full blown computers), software (either proprietary in the cloud or collaborative open source), applications (ranging from location based services that link up to social networks to your car linked up to a particular brand network) and ser- vices (from car sharing with RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) cards (Buzzcar), to blinds texting you or your service layer that they are out of battery power (Designer) is determined by the collaborative power of the internet. In this paper, we outline the Internet of Things’ recent history, technological challenges and policy ecology. We end by sketching a possible framework for grasping its impact in four domains: (1) the value chain where all objects can be tracked, logged and traced, (2) the service layer that can be built upon this, (3) the smart city layer and (4) its ultimate limit and scope of the Sensing Planet notion that aims to capture natural processes by globally dis- tributed sensor grids to have counterparts in the cloud.