Internet of Things - Global Technological and Societal Trends from Smart Environments and Spaces to Green Ict

Book excerpt: The book's aim is to define the Internet of Things (IoT) in a global view, present the research agenda for Internet of Things technologies by addressing the new technological developments and providing a global balanced coverage of the challenges and the technical and industrial trends.Energy consumption by the data, communication and networking devices and global CO2 emission is increasing exponentially. ICT has a dual role in this process: it accounts for about two percent of global CO2 emissions and at the same the ICT including IoT technologies and applications have a direct effect on lowering CO2 emissions, increasing energy efficiency, reducing power consumption, and achieving efficient waste recycling.The book builds on the ideas put forward by the European research Cluster on the Internet of Things Strategic Research Agenda and presents global views and state of the art results on the challenges facing the research, development and deployment of IoT at the global level.IoT together with the other emerging Internet developments such as Internet of Energy, Media, People, Services, Business/Enterprises are the backbone of the digital economy, the digital society and the foundation for the future knowledge based economy and innovation society. IoT developments show that we will have 16 billion connected devices by the year 2020 , which will average out to six devices per person on earth and to many more per person in digital societies.Devices like smart phones and machine to machine or thing to thing communication will be the main drivers for further IoT development.