Internet of Things: Definition, Applications, Issues and Future Prospective

International Journal on Recent and Innovation Trends in Computing and Communication ISSN: 2321-8169
Volume: 5 Issue: 8 113 – 116
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113
IJRITCC | August 2017, Available @ http://www.ijritcc.org
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Internet of Things: Definition, Applications, Issues and Future Prospective
Srishti Sharma
Research Scholar, Computer Engineering Department,
LDRP-ITR,
Gandhinagar, India
srishtis1258@gmail.com
Dr. Hiren B. Patel
HOD, Computer Engineering Department,
LDRP-ITR,
Gandhinagar, India
hod_ce@ldrp.ac.in
Abstract—Internet of Things (IoT) is the extension of Internet into the physical environment around us; by the embodiment of electronics
into the everyday physical objects that we tend to use. This makes the digital and physical entities linked by the means of appropriate
communication technologies. Penetration of these everyday objects into the web strengthens the goal of offering a whole new set of services to
the users, showing them the amalgamation of varied devices, versatile data and various technologies as one common operating picture, using
IoT. With the IoT advancements in various sectors, more number of devices are being digitally augmented leading to the discovery of newer
issues and challenges that are faced due to these 3 Vs; varied devices, versatile data and various technologies. This survey focuses on
identification of such issues and challenges in IoT; suggesting some clues for future research.
Keywords—Internet of Things; Definition of IoT; Embedded Sytem vs. IoT; Applications of IoT; Issues & Challenges in IoT; Future
Prospective of IoT
__________________________________________________*****_________________________________________________
I. INTRODUCTION
Internet of Things (IoT) is dense network of connected
physical things that are easily accessible through internet. The
―things‖ in IoT are objects that have an IP address associated
with them and have the ability to sense and transfer data over a
network without human intervention. The embedded
technology in the objects helps them interact with each other
and with the physical environment around.
Industries in the utilities, oil & gas, insurance,
manufacturing, transportation, infrastructure and retail sectors
are all reaping the benefits of IoT by making more informed
decisions, aided by the torrent of and transactional data at their
disposal.
IoT is most of the time confused with being embedded
system.
Fig. 1.1 IoT vs. Embedded System
Simply explaining, IoT is an amalgamation of Embedded
Technology (ET), Network Technology (NT) and Information
Technology (IT). Taking the example of a "Smart air
conditioning unit"; It is tempting to have your room be cool
enough by the time you reach home from your workplace so
when you leave from your office, you can remotely switch ON
the air conditioning unit of your home using your mobile
(another "Thing" connected to the internet). Technically, with
internet, you can control your air conditioner system from any
part of the world as long as both the air conditioner and your
mobile are connected using the "Internet". An extension to this
concept is: your mobile phone will command your home air
conditioner that you are leaving the office (it can detect your
GPS co-ordinates and decide you are are on the move) and
depending on the temperature, the air conditioner will be
switched ON by your mobile phone itself, and the mobile will
simply notify you that the air conditioner is ON.
For this purpose, your air conditioner is made smart by
embedding within it, a temperature sensor collecting
temperature data and a wifi module that would send the data to
the cloud (internet). This forms the Embedded System. The
ecosystem formed by wifi and the cloud is called Network
Technology. The mobile phone will have an application
running in it that will receive the data. Depending on the
received data, the app (in turn the mobile) will switch ON the
air conditioner depending on user’s GPS co-ordinates. The
mobile app infrastructure is Information Technology [6].
IoT application can help industries reduce cost with refined
process efficiency, maximize utilization and productivity.
With improved tracking of devices using sensors and
connectivity, the industries can benefit from real-time insights
and analytics, which would help them, make better decisions.
The growth of data, processes and things on the internet would
make such connections more relevant and important, creating
more opportunities for people, businesses and industries.
The rest of the paper has been divided into five sections.
The applications of IoT in various fields have been listed and
explained in the section two. Section three describes the issues
and challenges that are currently being faced in IoT while the
futures prospective have been mentioned in the section five.

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II. APPLICATIONS
Fig. 2.1 Applications of IoT [2]
A. Internet of Smart Living (IoSL)
Remote controlled Appliances: Home appliances such as
air conditioner, refrigerator, television, washing machine can
all be controlled using panels on the App running on your
mobile phones using IoT.
Safety Monitoring: Cameras and home alarm systems can
be used for detection of an unusual activity at home.
Intrusion detection system: Detection of windows or
doors being opened for intrusion detection.
Energy and Water use: Water and energy consumption
monitoring to reduce usage and cost.
B. Internet of Smart Cities (IoSC)
Structural Health: Monitoring of the structural health,
vibrations and material condition for buildings, bridges and
historic monuments.
Lightning: Weather adaptive street lights.
Transportation: Warning messages for diversions,
climatic conditions and traffic conditions.
Smart Parking: Monitoring of parking spaces at public
places; nearest parking space available.
Waste Management: Indicates the trash level in the trash
boxes; optimizing the trash collection route.
C. Internet of Smart Industry (IoSI)
Explosives and Hazardous gases: Detection of toxic gas
leakage at chemical factories or in the surrounding.
Maintenance and Repair: Early prediction on machine or
instrument malfunction; maintenance can thus be scheduled
timely.
D. Internet of Smart Environment (IoSE)
Air pollution monitoring: Monitoring the amount of CO2
in the air.
Forest fire detection: Detection of combustive gases in
forest area.
River Floods: Monitoring of water level and variations in
it in the river.
Protecting wildlife: Locating and tracking of animals for
their safety.
E. Internet of Smart Health (IoSH)
Patient Surveillance: Monitoring the condition of patients
in hospitals or at home.
Medical Fridges: Monitoring conditions inside a
refrigerator used for storing vaccines, medicines.
Physical Activity Monitoring: Monitoring heart rate
level, breathing and large motion caused by tossing and
turning during sleep.
F. Internet of Smart Agriculture (IoSA)
Green House: Recreation and maintenance of micro
climate conditions to increase production of crops.
Compost: Monitoring of temperature and humidity inside
the compost.
Offspring care: Control of growing conditions of the
offspring in animal farms.
G. Internet of Smart Energy (IoSEn)
Smart Grid: Energy consumption monitoring and
management.
Wind Turbines/Power houses: Monitoring and analyzing
the flow of control from the wind turbines and power houses.
III. ISSUES IN IOT
Fig. 3.1 Issues in IoT
A. Device Heterogenity
There are varied devices with varied capabilities being
used in the IoT applications. Different devices have different
computational and communication capabilities. This level of
heterogeneity needs to managed at both architectural and
protocol level.
B. Energy Optimization
Energy is the main constraint for the battery charged
devices used in IoT (mostly sensors). The energy spent by
them in commutations and communication must be minimized
as much possible at electronics level as well as at the protocols
level.
C. Data Management
The huge amount of data generated continuously by the
IoT devices needs to be analyzed properly and be turned into
useful format for interoperability between various
applications. Standard, well defined formats must be decided
for the data so as to make the data generated by different
devices; stored at different servers; supplied to different
applications interpretable and easy to use.
D. Node Identification and Addressing
With increasing number of devices in IoT, the node
addressing mechanism should be sufficient enough to provide
unique addresses to each of the devices in IoT. Also, for node
discovery, service discovery, and access control; node
identification mechanisms need to be dealt with.

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E. Things to Cloud Ecosystem
The wireless technology used for communication of the
data from the devices to the cloud needs to be secure, efficient,
provide Low-latency and higher throughput; as per the
application’s need. This ecosystem should be protected from
the attackers who could try manipulating or misusing the data.
F. Scalability and reliability
The addressing mechanism, interconnections, information
management and service provisioning mechanisms should
support the increasing number of devices allowing them to
scale well within the system. Node failure needs to be detected
and handled without interruption in the service.
G. Security, Privacy and Trust
IoT is vulnerable to attack since the devices spend most of
the time unattended and hence can physically be damaged and
communication is wireless which enables eavesdropping.
Implementation of complex security scheme is not possible
due to energy constraints. Authorization, access control,
digital forgetting, proxy attack are all the possible security
threats in IoT Application.
IV. CURRENT RESEARCH
A. Energy Optimization
1. Power consumption aware medium access protocols
According to [4], there are two types of protocols that
are used for medium access. The comparison table between
the two types has been given as table 1.
TABLE I. POWER CONSUMPTION AWARE MEDIUM ACCESS
PROTOCOLS [ 4]
Name Scheme Advantage Disadvantage Example
Schedule
Based
protocols
Use
TDMA
or
FDMA
with
TDMA
Avoids
collision,
idle
listening
and
overhearing
They need
clock
synchronizatio
n mechanism
Latency
MAC
Application
driven and
energy
efficient
communica
tion
protocol
Contenti
on based
protocols
Use
CSMA/
CA
Relax the
clock
synchroniza
tion
requirement
Wastage of
energy in idle
listening
Nano MAC
Protocol
Adaptive
Energy
Efficient
MAC
Protocol
2. Integration of several sources of energy harvesting
into sensors
Piezoelectric, thermoelectric and radio waves can be
used for recharging the devices.
B. Node Addressing
According to [3], the current mechanism used for node
addressing is the 6LoWPAN protocol. This protocol is an
enhanced version of IPv6 protocol which uses 128 bits
addressing. The RFID tags made use in the IoT applications
are 64-98 bit tags. Henceforth, there is an agent required to
convert these 64-98 bits into 128 bits address for a device. The
―agent‖ suggested in [3] gets the first 64 bits of the 128 bits
address from the RFID address of the tag attached to the
device and the rest of the 64 bits are from the network gateway
used. But there needs to be a better mechanism devised for
RFID tags with more than 64 bits address.
C. Node Identification
According to [1], there are two techniques that can be used
for node identification. They are:
Using RFID Tags
Advantage: cheaper
Disadvantage: requires possibility for the reader to access the
global database where information is stored
Providing description within the object itself
Advantage: no database lookup needed
Disadvantage: more electronics required in the device
D. Access Control - Security
According to [5], there are three types of access control
mechanism practiced till date. The comparison between the
three mechanisms has been given in table 2.
TABLE II. ACCESS CONTROL MECHANISMS [5]
Method Characteristics Advantages Disadvantages
Role based
access control
(RBAC)
Resources are
granted access
to on the basis
of the role of
user
Adding access
rights to users is
easy
Doesn’t support
least privilege
access
System wide
update is difficult
to be managed
Fine grained
access control if
required, leads to
role explosion
Attribute based
access control
(ABAC)
Resources are
granted access
to on the basis
of attributes of
the user
Attributes such
as time and
location can also
be considered
while
authenticating
Doesn’t support
least privilege
access
System wide
update is difficult
to manage
Capability
based access
control
(CapBAC)
Resources are
granted access
to by the
resource owner
Supports least
privilege access
to resources
No privilege
delegation
E. Things to Cloud Ecosystem
To secure the things to cloud ecosystem from all kinds of
attacks, [7] suggests use of BitBox.
The BitBox is designed to connect with all your exiting IOT
devices. The BitBox securely collects data from your IOT
device and back them up with an encrypted code.
It transfers data to cloud with each data encrypted individually.
This data on the BitBox can only be accessed by only the
primary user. Any unauthorized user that tries to access this
data we have to decrypt each data one by one.

Volume: 5 Issue: 8 113 – 116
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V. FUTURE PROSPECTIVE
As described in [4], the schedule based protocols as well as the
contention based protocols have a certain drawbacks that need
to be overcome. There can be Hybrid protocols developed
extracting the advantages and suppressing the disadvantages of
both theses type of protocols. Such Hybrid protocols can be
scalable, adaptable to changes in network size, node density
and topology. There can be mechanisms developed for
recycling the energies within the nodes. Node addressing
described in [3] can be further worked upon by developing a
new ―agent‖/mechanism for conversion of the RFID bits to
IPv6 address. The node identification mechanisms described
in [1] can be combined into a hybrid mechanism for node
identification; leaving behind the drawbacks and keeping the
advantages of both RFID tags and object description
mechanisms. The access control methods defined in [5] do not
have a privilege delegation mechanism supported within them.
A new access control mechanism can be developed providing
privilege delegation by enhancing CapBAC access control
method.
VI. CONCLUSION
IoT has become the next big leap in the field of Computer
Science. The seamless merger of real and virtual world,
through these massive deployments of IoT devices has opened
up new directions for research and business both. An attempt
to understand the huge potential of IoT, major issues to be
tracked and working on these issues, devising new technical
solutions shall help turning these research visions into reality.
REFERENCES
[1] Daniele Miorandi, Sabrina Sicari, Francesco De Pellegrini,
Imrich Chlamtac, Internet of Things: Vision, applications and
research challenges, Ad Hoc Networks 10 (2012) 1497-1516
[2] Keyur K Patel, Sunil M Patel, Internet of Things-IOT:
Definition, Characteristics, Architecture, Enabling
Technologies, Application & Future Challenges, International
Journal of Engineering Science and Computing, May 2016
[3] Luigi Atzori, Antonio lera, Giacomo Morabito, The Internet
of Things: A Survey, Computer Networks 54 (2010) 2787-
2805
[4] Adebayo Segun, Akinwunmi A.O, OguntiE.O, A survey of
Medium Access Control Protocols in Wireless Sensor
Network, International journal of computer applications
,Volume 116 – No. 22 – April 2015
[5] S. Sicari, A. Rizzardi, L.A Grieco, A. Coen-Porisini, Security,
privacy and trust in Internet of Things: The road ahead,
Computer Networks 76 (2015) 146-164
[6] https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-
embedded-systems-and-IOT
[7] http://trendebook.com/bitbox-internet-of-things-security/
[8] .http://www.intopalo.com/blog/2015-05-25-access-control-
for-internet-of-things/
[9] http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/definition/principle-of-
least-privilege-POLP
[10] http://www.webfarmr.eu/2011/05/coarse-grained-vs-fine-
grained-access-control-part-i/

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