Internet Of Things

Imagine a day when your refrigerator will monitor the milk you have, it will re-order it through an online transaction whenever it reaches a certain level. A day when you can track down your lost snail mail down to the exact point on Google Maps or any other online map application. This concept has been envisioned in 1999, by Auto-ID Center at MIT. It’s a simple yet powerful concept. An average human being is surrounded by 1000-5000 objects. If all these objects were attached with self-configuring wireless sensors, then you would have a huge network of objects … or an Internet of Things. Although it was envisioned way back in 1999, the technology to support such a concept was not around. For example, IPv4 did not support 50-100 trillion unique addresses. Now with Ipv6 this is possible. With research done on Semantic Web, we move yet another step closer to achieving the Internet of things vision. Where would this concept be really useful? Well, it’s already been put to use!! We see RFID tags being used in Logistics to track down deliveries. These deliveries can be monitored by anyone over a website. If you see the diagram attached, there is a demand for the theory and it is being put to use by different industries. How would this concept change things? Well, earlier the internet was centered on pages; each page would link to a different page. Then the concept of Model%E2%80%93View%E2%80%93Controller (MVC), wherein there was a controller who decided which page to show next to the visitor. You also had Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to help service providers publish their services for their users online. A good example would be the Fedex service for tracking down your mail packages. After the Internet of Things is completely embraced by the community, the future web would be built on an Event Driven Architecture. There would be a controller element … but the future pages would be dependent on what event has taken place. Think about the sheer volume of data that will be exchanged because of the sudden upsurge in the number of devices online. In 2009, the size of the internet was of the order of some exabytes (EB), now it will increase manifold. So the next time you are searching for that lost sock, just remember to ping it!