IP Connected Low Power Wireless Personal Area Networks in the Future Internet

Background

During the past few years Future Internet has been on the research agenda on a European level (European X-ETP Group, 2010). Future Internet research has chosen a holistic perspective by taking into account all building blocks from users, services and applications down to the networks. Information and communication technology are becoming smarter, smaller and faster; and, at the same time, society is progressively becoming more densely connected. As a result, Internet supported services are entering a new phase of mass deployment which brings a large number of new opportunities; but also challenges in terms of scalability, capacity, throughput, mobility and security etc.

A main strategic challenge for the European Future Internet initiative is the concept of Internet of Things. At the network level, there is no global architecture for the Internet of Things, and there is still an ongoing debate on how much intelligence shall be distributed to the edge of the networks instead of a more centralised approach (Islam and Grégoire, 2010). Despite this ongoing debate several attempts to define the Internet of Things concept can be found in the literature. As an example Atzori, Iera, and Morabito (2010) describes Internet of Things as a world-wide network infrastructure of interconnected objects that are uniquely addressable and that communicate by using standard protocols.