Editorial: Special issue on Internet of Things: convergence of sensing, networking, and web technologies

Abstract

Internet is quickly progressing toward the seamless interaction of objects, sensors, and computing devices, usually indicated as the Internet of Things (IoT). Several examples exist where wireless sensor networks, mobile equipments, RFID tags, home appliances, cars, and many other daily objects talk to each other, exchange information, generate aggregated knowledge, and allow to quickly develop new advanced services for the final user. A comprehensive reference scenario is smart grids, i.e., electricity networks that can intelligently integrate the behavior and actions of all objects connected in order to efficiently deliver sustainable, economic, and secure electricity supplies using a two-way digital communication technology. The IoT requires powerful networking environments on one side and sophisticated data aggregation and processing technologies on the other. As sensing technologies perceive the world without human intervention, the amount of generated data is far beyond the one we are used to, where operators traditionally provide input data. Thus, the IoT is becoming a unifying concept where sensing, computing, and web technologies converge, interact, and integrate each other.For IoT to become a reality, several technical, social, and economical problems still need to be addressed. This Special Issue of the EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking highlights some of the emerging issues in IoT and associated systems, along with their applicability in an innovative and insightful way.The papers in this Special Issue are organized into three thematic groups. The first set of four papers focuses on frameworks and architectures for realizing various aspects of IoT, ranging from device interoperability issues, to service composition methodologies and userinteraction models for IoT, as well as efficiently combining different underlying technologies for building next generation services. Specifically, in "Mashing Up the Internet of Things: A Framework for Smart Environments" [1], a framework and an user-interaction model for IoT applications are introduced toward addressing the following key questions: how data and functionality provided by services on smart environments can be modeled in order to facilitate abstraction and composition, and second, how users are intended to interact with the environments in order to make applications support their particular needs. In "P2P and Grid Computing: Opportunity for Building Next Generation Wireless Multimedia Digital Library" [2], a framework for wireless multimedia digital library is designed, by adopting peer-to-peer overlay networking technology to address the storage space problem and by using grid computing approach to maintain security. In "A Webbased Two-layered Integration Framework for Smart Devices" [3], a web-based framework is provided that enables smart devices to integrate with each other via light-weight interfaces and other back-end applications into agile business process, while a real-life use case on elderly care is studied in detail ...