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1.1 The vision of Ambient Intelligence

The most common form of information processing has happened on large, general-purpose
computational devices, ranging from old-fashioned mainframes to modern laptops or palmtops. In
many applications, like office applications, these computational devices are mostly used to process
information that is at its core centered around a human user of a system, but is at best indirectly
related to the physical environment.
In another class of applications, the physical environment is at the focus of attention. Computation
is used to exert control over physical processes, for example, when controlling chemical processes
in a factory for correct temperature and pressure. Here, the computation is integrated with the
control; it is embedded into a physical system. Unlike the former class of systems, such embedded
systems are usually not based on human interaction but are rather required to work without it; they
are intimately tied to their control task in the context of a larger system.
Such embedded systems are a well-known and long-used concept in the engineering sciences (in
fact, estimates say that up to 98 % of all computing devices are used in an embedded context).
Their impact on everyday life is also continuing to grow at a quick pace. Rare is the household
where embedded computation is not present to control a washing machine, a video player, or a cell
phone. In such applications, embedded systems meet human-interaction-based systems.
Technological progress is about to take this spreading of embedded control in our daily lives a step
further. There is a tendency not only to equip larger objects like a washing machine with embedded
computation and control, but also smaller, even dispensable goods like groceries; in addition,
living and working spaces themselves can be endowed with such capabilities. Eventually,
computation will surround us in our daily lives, realizing a vision of “Ambient Intelligence”
where many different devices will gather and process information from many different sources to
both control physical processes and to interact with human users. By integrating computation and
control in our physical environment, the well-known interaction paradigms of person-to-person,
person-to-machine and machine-to-machine can be supplemented, in the end, by a notion of
person-to-physical world; the interaction with the physical world becomes more important than
mere symbolic data manipulation.
To realize this vision, a crucial aspect is needed in addition to computation and control which is
communication. All these sources of information have to be able to transfer the information to
the place where it is needed – an actuator or a user – and they should collaborate in providing as
precise a picture of the real world as is required. For some application scenarios, such networks of
sensors and actuators are easily built using existing, wired networking technologies. For many
other application types, however, the need to wire together all these entities constitutes a
considerable obstacle to success: Wiring is expensive in particular, given the large number of
devices that is imaginable in our environment; wires constitute a maintenance problem; wires
prevent entities from being mobile; and wires can prevent sensors or actuators from being close to

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the phenomenon that they are supposed to control. Hence, wireless communication between
such devices is, in many application scenarios, an inevitable requirement.
Therefore, a new class of networks has appeared in the last few years: the so-called Wireless
Sensor Network (WSN). These networks consist of individual nodes that are able to interact with
their environment by sensing or controlling physical parameters; these nodes have to collaborate
to fulfill their tasks as, usually, a single node is incapable of doing so; and they use wireless
communication to enable this collaboration. In essence, the nodes without such a network contain
at least some computation, wireless communication, and sensing or control functionalities.
Despite the fact that these networks also often include actuators, the term wireless sensor network
has become the commonly accepted name. Sometimes, other names like “wireless sensor and
actuator networks” are also found. Sensors link the physical with the digital world by capturing
and revealing real-world phenomena and converting these into a form that can be processed, stored,
and acted upon. Integrated into numerous devices, machines, and environments, sensors provide a
tremendous societal benefit. They can help to avoid catastrophic infrastructure failures, conserve
precious natural resources, increase productivity, enhance security, and enable new applications
such as context-aware systems and smart home technologies. The phenomenal advances in
technologies such as very large-scale integration (VLSI), microelectromechanical systems
(MEMS), and wireless communications further contribute to the widespread use of distributed
sensor systems. For example, the impressive developments in semiconductor technologies
continue to produce microprocessors with increasing processing capacities, while at the same time
shrinking in size. The miniaturization of computing and sensing technologies enables the
development of tiny, low-power, and inexpensive sensors, actuators, and controllers. Further,
embedded computing systems (i.e., systems that typically interact closely with the physical world
and are designed to perform only a limited number of dedicated functions) continue to find
application in an increasing number of areas. While defense and aerospace systems still dominate
the market, there is an increasing focus on systems to monitor and protect civil infrastructure (such
as bridges and tunnels), the national power grid, and pipeline infrastructure. Networks of hundreds
of sensor nodes are already being used to monitor large geographic areas for modeling and
forecasting environmental pollution and flooding, collecting structural health information on
bridges using vibration sensors, and controlling usage of water, fertilizers, and pesticides to
improve crop health and quantity.

1.2 An overview of Internet of Things (IoT) and Wireless Sensor

Networks (WSN) architecture
The Internet-of-Things (IoT) is a self-configuring and adaptive network which connects real-world
things to the Internet enabling them to communicate with other connected objects leading to the
realization of a new range of ubiquitous services. The term IoT originates to Massachusetts
Institute of Technology Auto-ID center when it was chosen by Kevin Ashton in 1999. However,
the concept of connecting devices to the Internet to remotely monitor their status has been
introduced for the first time in 1982 by a group of students at Carnegie Mellon University when

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they managed to connect a coke machine to the Internet and remotely check its status.
Advancements in science and technology enabled making smaller, cheaper, and faster computing
devices capable of sensing the environment, communicating and actuating remotely, which
resulted to the increased interest of applying the IoT to vast aspects of life, such as smart cities,
healthcare, and smart home.
The Internet of Things (IoT) describes physical objects, that are embedded with sensors,
processing ability, communication capability, software, and other technologies, and that
connect and exchange data with other devices and systems over the Internet. It refers to
connected device and sensor technology enabled by secure network connectivity and cloud
infrastructure, to reliably transform data into useful information for people, businesses, and
institutions. At its core, the Internet of things means just an environment that gathers information
from multiple devices (computers, vehicles, smartphones, traffic lights, and almost anything with
a sensor) and applications (anything from a social media app like Twitter to an e-commerce
platform, from a manufacturing system to a traffic control system. Yet data alone is useless, it
needs to be interpreted and turned into information and this information is often required to be
exchanged with other devices or applications to generate business value.
The IoT is already around us connecting wearable devices, smart cars, and smart home systems. It
is expected that more than 50 billion devices will be connected to the Internet by 2020. The
introduction of such a huge number of connected devices requires a scalable architecture to
accommodate them without any degradation of the quality of service demanded by applications.
In addition, the majority of the devices that make up the Internet-of-Things are resource
constrained; resources, such as computing power, energy, bandwidth, and storage, are scarce.
These constraints limit the deployment scenarios of applications using such IoT devices. For
instance, it is infeasible to use a battery-powered sensor to directly connect to the Internet and
publish information regarding its surrounding for a long time or store readings of a longer time in
local memory. These constraints present a design challenge that is shaping the architecture of the
IoT in many ways. Many of these challenges can be mitigated by extending the functions of Cloud
computing closer to the IoT devices.
The architecture of the IoT is an active research area. Architecture plays a critical role in
determining the success of a system. As such, there are several efforts ranging from public projects
to industrial standard associations and academic institutions to set a working IoT architecture. An
IoT system is naturally a distributed system by definition. Hence, the components identified above
are geographically distributed where the communication component is in charge of connecting
them. In the simplest form, two groups can be formed: the first group contains identification and
sensing while the second one hosts computation, services, and semantics.
A straightforward way to make an IoT device visible through the Internet is to provide it with an
access to a Cloud server, such that it can upload data, receive notifications or commands. In such
configuration, the client handles reading data from the environment and most of the remaining
functions run in the Cloud. This traditional client–server approach of organizing the different

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components of IoT is still used by many vendors. There are also many variations of this
architecture to separate certain logical components of the system into three or five layers as shown
in Figure 1.1. These separations of concerns are mostly based on the functionality of the module.
In the three-layer architecture, the sensors appear in the lower perception layer. Network layer,
which is located on top of perception layer, connects the sensors to the topmost application layer.
The functionality of each layer is distinct in this approach. The sensors and actuators in the
perception layer gather the data that will be transported through the network to ultimately reach
the application logic. Figure 1.1 shows the different types of logical separation of IoT elements.
Other alternatives of this architecture proposal divide the layers into five. Some of these variations
consider middleware and object abstraction as separate layers. These additional layers help provide
integration services and encapsulate the devices in the perception layer, respectively. Even though,
implementing these layers of logically separated components as such provides modularity and ease
of implementation, it fails to address the requirements of the perception layer, such as low latency
communication and mobility.

Figure 1.1: IoT architecture proposals (three layers and five layers)
The perception layer or sensor network layer, shown in Figure 1.2, can be composed of millions
of devices. The majority of these devices are very tiny in size, battery powered, and have small
memory and limited processing power. Such resource constraints necessitate novel design
approaches to accommodate them. In addition, various wireless communication protocols are
widely used for networking such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), LoRa, ZigBee, RFID,
and 6LoWPAN. Besides the foregoing network protocol variations, there are differences in
application layer protocols even among devices using the same underlying network protocol. For
instance, CoAP, MQTT, DDS, and XMPP are among the frequently used ones. Furthermore, there
are multiple data formats used by these protocols that are application domain specific. The resource
constraints mentioned above, the heterogeneity of protocols, platforms, and data formats, call for
the design of more efficient and IoT-friendly architectures.

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Figure 1.2: High-level overview of IoT

The design process of a concrete architecture for a system depends on the attributes of the specific
application. However, based on the generic IoT challenges and requirements highlighted above, it
is possible to have a reasonable generic architecture design. Following on the logical separation of
functional components that resulted in three or five layers, we can map the logical components to
physical computing layers. As mentioned earlier, in a client–server approach, most of the
components (shown in Figure 1.1) would run in the server located in a cloud. Unfortunately, this
approach does not address all the requirements discussed above. This initiated the research for an
alternative computing hierarchy that works well for IoT. Fog computing is introduced as an
intermediate layer between the perception layer and the Cloud, giving more flexibility of choice
for deploying the components of an IoT system architecture. Figure1.2 shows how Fog computing
fits between the perception layer or sensors and the Cloud layer.
In this course, we will focus our attention on the sensor network (perception) layer. It will
deal with the fundamental aspects of wireless sensor networks (WSNs), covering both
theoretical concepts and practical aspects of network technologies and protocols, operating
systems, middleware, and wireless sensor node programming.

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1.3 Wireless Sensor Networks

A Wireless sensor network is an autonomous system that consist collection of undersized
individual sensor nodes each with a sensing, processing, communication, and battery unit,
spatially distributed over an area of interest to sense certain physical phenomena. Depending
on the application scenario, this number may be raised to hundreds to thousands apiece, where a
node is connected with additional nodes. Each sensor node in a wireless sensor network observes
its environmental phenomena and this collected information is transmitted to one or more sink
stations through a wireless link depending on the network deployment.
There are three main functionalities of sensor node: the first is sensing its neighbouring
atmosphere, the second is processing the data which was initially observed, and the third is
communicating or connecting through additional sensor nodes or sink stations within the network.
Among these above specifications, sensing the environment is the most important one.
WSNs can be structured in centralized, distributed, and ad hoc ways. Figure 1.3 shows the general
communication structure of a WSN. It primarily consists of sensor field, sink node, and user or
task management component. Sensor nodes deployed in a specific area is known as a sensor field.
Each sensor node in the sensor field is capable of sensing its own respective environment
phenomenon and routing the observed data to the sink node through a multi-hop connection. A
sink node is a special kind of sensor node which collects data from the sensor field and performs
the necessary operations or simply forwards the collected data to the user or task manager node.
In addition, it also sends queries to the sensor nodes in the network and retrieves the required data.
Finally, the user or task manager node accords an assignment to each sensor node in the sensor
field. Nevertheless, the sink node connects with the user or task manager node via an Internet or
satellite connection

Figure 1.3: Communication architecture of a wireless sensor network.

1.3.1 Unique features of WSN: Challenges and Requirements

The collaborative nature of WSNs brings several advantages over conventional wireless ad-hoc
networks, including self-organization, rapid deployment, flexibility, and inherent intelligent-

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processing capability. However, the unique features of WSN present new challenges in hardware
design, communication protocols, and application design. A WSN technology must address these
challenges to realize the numerous envisioned applications. This requires modifying legacy
protocols for conventional wireless ad-hoc networks or designing new effective communication
protocols and algorithms.
Table 1 lists important challenges and corresponding required mechanisms to address them in
WSN. Sensor nodes have resource constraints including limited energy, limited memory and
computational capacities. The limited energy supplies of the sensor nodes in the network impose
lifetime constraints on the WSN. The problem of limited resources can be addressed by using them
efficiently. Energy efficient operation is required to maximize the network lifetime by
implementing energy efficient protocols, e.g., energy-aware routing on network layer, energy-
saving mode on MAC layer, etc. Efficient use of limited memory in sensors is required by taking
into account the memory consuming issues like routing tables, data replication, security, etc.
Table 1: Challenges vs. Required mechanisms in WSN

Dynamic network topologies and harsh environment conditions may cause sensor-node failures
and performance degradation. This requires WSN to support adaptive network operation including
adaptive signal-processing algorithms and communication protocols to enable end-users to cope
with dynamic wireless-channel conditions and varying connectivity.
The communication in WSN is unreliable due to error prone wireless medium with high bit error
rates and variable-link capacity. Thus, a WSN should be reliable in order to function properly and
depending on the application requirements, the sensed data should be reliably delivered to the sink
node. WSNs are usually prone to unexpected node failures due to different reasons like nodes may
run out of energy or might be damaged (in extreme environment conditions), or wireless
communication between two nodes can be permanently interrupted. This requires WSNs to be
robust to node failures. In WSN, fault tolerance can be improved through a high level of
redundancy by deploying additional nodes than required if all nodes functioned properly. In case
of high-density deployment, sensor observations can be highly correlated in the space domain.
Data fusion and localized processing are required to address the data redundancy such that only
necessary information is delivered to the end-user and communication overhead can be reduced.

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1.3.2 Types of WSNs

Presently many WSNs are deployed on land, underground and underwater. They face different
challenges and constraints depending on their environment. We present five types of WSNs as
shown in Figure 1.4.

Figure 1.4: Types of WSNs

1. Terrestrial WSN: consists in a large number (hundreds to thousands) of low-cost nodes
deployed on land in a given area, usually in an ad-hoc manner (e.g. nodes dropped from an
airplane). In terrestrial WSNs, sensor nodes must be able to effectively communicate data back to
the base station in a dense environment. Since battery power is limited and usually non-
rechargeable, terrestrial sensor nodes can be equipped with a secondary power source such as solar
cells. Energy can be conserved with multi-hop optimal routing, short transmission range, in-
network data aggregation, and using low duty-cycle operations. Common applications of terrestrial
WSNs are environmental sensing and monitoring, industrial monitoring, and surface explorations.
2. Underground WSN: consists of a number of sensor nodes deployed in caves or mines or
underground to monitor underground conditions. In order to relay information from the
underground sensor nodes to the base station, additional sink nodes are located above ground.
They are more expensive than terrestrial WSNs as they require appropriate equipment to ensure
reliable communication through soil, rocks, and water. Wireless communication is a challenge in
such environment due to high attenuation and signal loss. Moreover, it is difficult to recharge or
replace the battery of nodes buried underground making it important to design energy efficient
communication protocol for prolonged lifetime. Underground WSNs are used in many
applications such as agriculture monitoring, landscape management, underground monitoring of
soil, water or mineral, and military border monitoring.
3. Underwater WSNs: consists of sensors deployed underwater, for example, into the ocean
environment. Such nodes being expensive, only a few nodes are deployed and autonomous
underwater vehicles are used to explore or gather data from them. Underwater wireless
communication uses acoustic waves that presents various challenges such as limited bandwidth,

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long propagation delay, high latency, and signal fading problems. These nodes must be able to
self-configure and adapt to extreme conditions of ocean environment. Nodes are equipped with a
limited battery which cannot be replaced or recharged requiring energy efficient underwater
communication and networking techniques. Applications of underwater WSNs include pollution
monitoring, under-sea surveillance and exploration, disaster prevention and monitoring, seismic
monitoring, equipment monitoring, and underwater robotics.
4. Multi-media WSN: consists of low-cost sensor nodes equipped with cameras and microphones,
deployed in a pre-planned manner to guarantee coverage. Multi-media sensor devices are capable
of storing, processing, and retrieving multimedia data such as video, audio, and images. They must
cope with various challenges such as high bandwidth demand, high energy consumption, quality
of service (QoS) provisioning, data processing and compressing techniques, and cross-layer
design. It is required to develop transmission techniques that support high bandwidth and low
energy consumption in order to deliver multi-media content such as a video stream. Though QoS
provisioning is difficult in multi-media WSNs due to variable link capacity and delay, a certain
level of QoS must be achieved for reliable content delivery. Multi-media WSNs enhance the
existing WSN applications such as tracking and monitoring.
5. Mobile WSN: consists of mobile sensor nodes that can move around and interact with the
physical environment. Mobile nodes can re-position and organize themselves in the network in
addition to be able to sense, compute, and communicate. A dynamic routing algorithm must, thus,
be employed unlike fixed routing in static WSN. Mobile WSNs face various challenges such as
deployment, mobility management, localization with mobility, navigation and control of mobile
nodes, maintaining adequate sensing coverage, minimizing energy consumption in locomotion,
maintaining network connectivity, and data distribution. Primary examples of mobile WSN
applications are monitoring (environment, habitat, underwater), military surveillance, target
tracking, search and rescue. A higher degree of coverage and connectivity can be achieved with
mobile sensor nodes compared to static nodes.

1.4 Sensor Node Description

A sensor node is a tiny device that consists of four major hardware components, namely the sensing
unit, processing unit, transceiver, and power generator. In addition, the sensor node also uses
location devices such as global positioning system (GPS) and a mobilizer. Figure 1.5 shows the
basic configuration of a sensor node.

1.4.1 Sensing Unit

A sensing unit observes its environmental phenomena for gathering information (such as
temperature, pressure, light, and displacement) as well as producing the corresponding output as
an optical or electrical signal. A sensing unit basically consists of two parts; a sensor and an analog
to digital converter (ADC). In the sensor part, one or more sensors there produce the analog signals,
and these analog signals are transferred into digital signals through the ADC and fed into a

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processing unit for supplementary operations. Based on the observed or gathered phenomena,
sensor nodes are classified as thermal, optical, acoustic, mechanical sensors, etc.

Figure 1.5: Basic configuration of sensor node.

1.4.2 Processing Unit

A processing unit includes two parts; storage plus a processor. The storage component, which
works as nonvolatile memory is used to store programming instructions and temporarily stores
sensed data. Also, it will store processed data on occasion. The processor in a sensor node makes
the sensor node collaborate with other nodes in the network to complete the designated exercise.
The microcontroller performs tasks, processes the data, and controls the other functionalities of a
sensor node. Because of some special characteristics of microcontrollers, like low cost, easy
attachment with supplementary apparatuses, effortlessness of training, and low power utilization,
microcontrollers are mostly used as the processing units in sensor nodes. ATMEL, Atmega 128L,
ESP8266, ESP32, MSP430 etc. are the most commonly used microcontrollers because they have
power saving capabilities. Among these, MSP430 and ESP32 have six different power modes from
wholly energetic to wholly powered down. These kinds of power reduction approaches enlarge the
system lifetime and make the sensor node live longer.

1.4.3 Transceiver Unit

The transceiver attaches the node to the network. It is an amalgamation of transmitter and receiver
to a solitary device which works on specific radio frequency (RF). The RF message requires

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modulation, filtering, multiplexing, band bass, and demodulation, which makes it more complex
and expensive. Basically, sensor node uses industrial scientific medical bands (ISM) which
provide a radio band at no cost with comprehensive accessibility. There are three transmission
technologies offered in wireless transmission; optical communication, infrared, and radio
frequency. First, optical communication requires low power, line of sight, and squat at atmospheric
circumstances. Second, infrared communication has no need for antennae, but has a low
broadcasting capacity. Third, radio frequency communication is the most relevant method best
suited for wireless transmission because it provides free spectrum at 173, 433, 868, and 915 MHz
and 2.4 GHz.
The majority of sensor nodes use low-rate, wireless personal area networks (WPAN) which are
IEEE 802.15.4 standard, meaning the transceiver has four operational modes, like transmit,
receive, idle, and sleep. In receive and idle mode, the power consumption of the transceiver is the
same. However, the transceiver should initiate sleep mode and not be left in idle mode when it is
not actively working, otherwise considerable energy will be wasted. It will simply interchange
from sleep state to the active broadcast or receive state.

1.4.4 Power Unit

The sensor node is a small micro electrical appliance which consists of low energy. The power
unit sustains the sensor node in a rough and unconditional environment where changing batteries
is expensive and difficult. Mainly, sensor nodes use their energy for sensing, transmission, and
data aggregation purposes. Among these aforementioned operations, the transmission of
information consumes the majority of energy, compared to the other operations. The power source
of a sensor node is constituted by a rechargeable or non-rechargeable battery. Rechargeable sensor
nodes are capable to renovate their power from the nature circumstances like solar, high
temperature differences, and pulsation. Non-rechargeable sensor nodes must be competent to
operate until either the assignment time is completed or the battery is replaced. However, based
on the application scenario, the lifetime of sensor node will be decided. For example, scientists
monitoring the presence or age of ice (especially in the form of glaciers) or observing the bed
slides in the ocean need the sensors to be able to work continuously. When the sensors are deployed
in the battlefield, finding the temperature in particular area may need a few hours or days. In the
past, the batteries of tiny sensor nodes were manufactured with vanadium and molybdenum oxide.
Future energy exploration from the environment occurred because sensor nodes operated in
irregular places. The battery for sensor nodes should be as small and efficient as possible. Nickel–
zinc, lithium–ion, and nickel–metal hydride electrochemical objects are used for their electrodes.
In addition, some routing protocols and specific applications need the location of a sensor node
because they are generally deployed in unconditional areas and need to collaborate with other
sensor nodes about their present location for the transmission of data, which is possible by a
location finding system. A mobilizer is an optional component in the description of a sensor node
which moves the sensor node from one place to another place to complete the assigned task.

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1.5 IoT Architecture and Core IoT Modules

The IoT ecosphere starts with the simplest of sensors located in the remotest corners of the earth,
and translates analog physical effects into digital signals (the language of the internet). Data then
takes a complex journey through wired and wireless signals, various protocols, natural
interference, and electromagnetic collisions, before arriving the internet. From there, packetized
data will traverse various channels arriving at a cloud or large data center. The strength of IoT is
not just one signal from one sensor, but the aggregate of hundreds, thousands, potentially millions
of sensors, events, and devices.

1.5.1 IoT ecosystem

These industries will rely on the hardware, software, and services provided by the bulk of the IT
industry. Nearly every major technology company is investing or has invested heavily in IoT
space. New markets and technologies have already formed (and some have collapsed or been
acquired). The different segments in information technology, as they all have a role in IoT include:
▪ Sensors: Embedded systems, real-time operating systems, energy-harvesting sources,
Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMs).
▪ Sensor communication systems: Wireless personal area networks reach from 0 cm to 100
m. Low-speed and low-power communication channels, often non-IP based have a place
in sensor communication.
▪ Local area networks: Typically, IP-based communication systems such as 802.11 Wi-Fi
used for fast radio communication, often in peer-to-peer or star topologies.
▪ Aggregators, routers, gateways: Embedded systems providers, cheapest vendors
(processors, DRAM, and storage), module vendors, passive component manufacturers, thin
client manufacturers, cellular and wireless radio manufacturers, middleware providers, fog
framework providers, edge analytics packages, edge security providers, certificate
management systems.
▪ WAN: Cellular network providers, satellite network providers, Low-Power Wide-Area
Network (LPWAN) providers. Typically using internet transport protocols targeted for IoT
and constrained devices like MQTT, CoAP, and even HTTP.
▪ Cloud: Infrastructure as a service provider, platform as a service provider, database
manufacturers, streaming and batch processing manufacturers, data analytics packages,
software as a service provider, data lake providers, Software Defined
Networking/Software-Defined Perimeter providers, and machine learning services.
▪ Data analytics: As the information propagates to the cloud en-mass. Dealing with volumes
data and extracting value is the job of complex event processing, data analytics, and
machine learning techniques.
▪ Security: Tying the entire architecture together is security. Security will touch every
component from physical sensors to the CPU and digital hardware, to the radio
communication systems, to the communication protocols themselves. Each level needs to

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ensure security, authenticity, and integrity. There cannot be the weak link in a chain, as the
IoT will form the largest attack surface on earth.
This ecosystem will need talents from the body of engineering disciplines, such as device physics
scientists developing new sensor technologies and many-year batteries. Embedded system
engineers working on driving sensors at the edge. Network engineers capable of working in a
personal area network or wide area network as well as a Software-Defined Networking. Data
scientists working on novel machine learning schemes at the edge and in the cloud. DevOps
engineers to successfully deploy scalable cloud solutions as a well as fog solutions. IoT will also
need service vendors such as solution provision firms, system integrators, value-added resellers,
and OEMs.

1.5.2 IoT versus machine to machine

One common area of confusion in the IoT world is what separates it from the technologies that
defined machine to machine (M2M). Before IoT became part of the mainstream vernacular, M2M
was the hype. M2M and IoT are very similar technologies, but there is a significant difference:
▪ M2M: It is a general concept involving an autonomous device communicating directly to
another autonomous device. Autonomous refers to the ability of the node to instantiate and
communicate information with another node without human intervention. The form of
communication is left open to the application. It may very well be the case that an M2M
device uses no inherent services or topologies for communication. This leaves out typical
internet appliances used regularly for cloud services and storage. An M2M system may
communicate over non-IP based channels as well, such as a serial port or custom protocol.
▪ IoT: IoT systems may incorporate some M2M nodes (such as a Bluetooth mesh using non-
IP communication), but aggregates data at an edge router or gateway. An edge appliance
like a gateway or router serves as the entry point onto the internet. Alternatively, some
sensors with more substantial computing power can push the internet networking layers
onto the sensor itself. Regardless of where the internet on-ramp exists, the fact that it has a
method of tying into the internet fabric is what defines IoT.

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