The successful study of any subject begins with using good definitions. Without clear definitions, the boundaries become fuzzy and immediate consequences and implications become unclear. The term Internet of Things started as a visionary statement, a buzz word, rather than a definition. While the term has enjoyed exceptional media coverage, the visionary statement has been interpreted differently by different people.

The term is normally considered to be coined by Kevin Ashton in 1999 when he described a future where things such as barcode readers would be directly connected to the internet, without the interference of humans. Humans were likened to bad, slow, and error prone routers. While “things” had already been connected to the internet way before this statement, the term had not been coined yet. The utility sector, for instance, had long used connected meters to retrieve meting data automatically. This was first done using modems and the phone network already in the late 70s and 80s. When ISPs began providing internet access locally, switching to the internet became a way to reduce costs, since local phone calls could be used instead of long distance calls. Even the internet itself is a network of things. Computers and servers are naturally things that are connected. But here, thing has come to mean non-computer-thing, even though the thing must have a small computer inside, to be able to connect...confusing…

So, to avoid any further confusion, let’s provide a clear definition of what the Internet of Things is.

This definition has four clear areas of study that we will introduce in this book:

While the Internet of Things has seen a lot of development in the first two areas mentioned previously, the last two are underdeveloped and often omitted. This has lead people such as James Clapper, former Director of National Intelligence in the USA, to state that America’s Greatest Threat is the Internet of Things (http://www.popsci.com/clapper-americas-greatest-threat-is-internet-things).

As different companies and organizations strive to get attention, it’s not surprising to find a myriad of similar buzz words being used, each one highlighting different aspects of the same underlying problem, or to boast of one’s supposedly exceptional understanding of the subject. Web of Things (WoT), for instance, concerns itself with web-based technologies for the Internet of Things, such as the HTTP and Web Services. It forms a clear subset of the Internet of Things (IoT). A Connected Device is often used as a selling point. It normally refers to the internet connectivity of the device, and then falls under IoT or WoT. As an extension, the Connected Home, Connected Car, and so on, are specializations of this trend. Perhaps as an attempt to boast, Internet of Everything (IoE) was coined. But how do you connect something that is not a thing? Can you connect an emotion or a smell, without a thing in between doing the sensing? How do you connect space or water? How about abstract things, such as happiness, how do you connect that? Clearly, IoE comprises the same items and technologies as Internet of Things, but with a more bombastic title. The same can be said about Internet of People and Things. This term tries to include human interaction into the equation. But humans and their processes are already implicitly included in the original term “Internet”; it needs no further introduction. But there exists terminology that have clear differences in meaning, that are worth mentioning. Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication relates to communication between machines, including devices and things. It doesn’t presuppose the use of the IP protocol, and the internet. Many different types of protocols and technologies can be used in M2M solutions, including the IP protocol. But solutions are typically sealed or closed. The internet, if used, is used as a carrier of signals and not a platform for interoperability. Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) is like M2M in the sense that it doesn’t presuppose the use of the IP-protocol. In CPS, however, it’s the interaction between algorithms running on machines with the physical environment that is of interest.

For our purposes, since we aim at being able to build smart interoperable cities and societies, the term Internet of Things fits best. Taking the full definition of IoT given earlier, we could even say that we try to build an Internet for Things, by providing the necessary infrastructure for things to be able to make good decisions during their connected life-times. But what is a Smart City, or a Smart Society?

In a Smart City, or a Smart Society, you have:

When you’ve completed reading this book, you’ll know how to accomplish this goal.

Chapter 1,Preparing Our First Raspberry Pi Project, introduces you to development for Raspberry Pi. You’ll get an introduction to the Raspberry Pi and peripherals and how to prepare, start, and administer your device. You’ll learn how to develop, compile, run, deploy, and test your application on your device.

Chapter 2, Creating a Sensor to Measure Ambient Light, shows you how to create a basic sensor firmware application for your device. This includes sampling, error correction, management of physical quantities, basic statistics, and data persistence.

Chapter 3, Creating an Actuator for Controlling Illumination, focuses on how to create a basic actuator firmware application. You’ll learn how to define control parameters, use relays to control equipment, persist control states, and log important control events.

Chapter 4, Publishing Information Using MQTT, presents a simple way to publish your information on the internet. It introduces you to the MQTT protocol, the Publish/Subscribe communication pattern, how to connect to a broker, publish information, and subscribe to information. You’ll learn to test and troubleshoot your communication and consider basic security issues.

Chapter 5, Publishing Data Using HTTP, introduces you to the HTTP protocol and the Request/Response communication pattern. This includes locating resources on the internet and basic protocol semantics. You’ll also learn how to publish machine-readable web service interfaces and the fundamentals of encryption.

Chapter 6, Creating Web Pages for Your Devices, continues by focusing on human interfaces for your devices, and how they can be used to monitor and interact with them. You’ll learn how to publish file-based content how to use Markdown to publish human-readable web content, how to interact with backend web services from JavaScript. You will also learn how to perform basic authentication using login pages and Java Web Tokens (JWT).

Chapter 7, Communicating More Efficiently Using CoAP, shows you how to create interfaces for resource-constrained devices. You’ll get an introduction to the CoAP protocol, how security is performed, how content is encoded, how data is published, and how to respond to control actions. You’ll be introduced to a new Communication Pattern, the Event Subscription, and the Observe pattern. You’ll learn how to test your CoAP-enabled devices and how to secure them using encryption.

Chapter 8, Interoperability, introduces the concept of application-level interoperability and how standardized technologies can help us in our work. You’ll be introduced to Constrained RESTful Environments (CoRE), the Light-weight Machine-to-Machine(LWM2M) enabler , and a standardized object model for the management of devices based on CoAP and CoRE. IPSO Smart Objects, a set of standardized object interfaces for sensors and actuators, will also be presented.

Chapter 9, Social Interaction with Your Devices Using XMPP, begins a series of chapters introducing a more advanced paradigm of communication with devices that will allow us to do much more interesting things with them in a more secure and interoperable, yet flexible manner. This chapter introduces the XMPP protocol and the basics of XMPP extensions. It introduces a trust-based model for communication and security in a social context. The chapter shows how the Request/Response, Event Subscription, and Publish/Subscribe patterns can be used in XMPP. It also shows how to build human-to-machine chat interfaces.

Chapter 10, The Controller, introduces a new type of device, the controller. It presents a way to register and discover things on the internet using Thing Registries. It will subscribe to data from sensors it finds and accepts and send control operation commands to appropriate actuators it finds and accepts.

Chapter 11, Product Life Cycle, highlights that managing devices in an IoT infrastructure is more complicated than just installing devices, finding them, and starting to communicate with them. You need to manage the devices over their entire life cycle. You also need to consider operating costs, without compromising on the security and integrity of the data and people involved. This chapter introduces a method of provisioning that takes all these aspects into account. It defines the concept of ownership of data, and how owners can claim their devices. It presents a decision support extension to XMPP that helps devices determine who can be their friends and who can do what with them, based on the wishes of their owners.

Chapter 12, Concentrators and Bridges, presents a method to encapsulate virtual devices inside one communicating entity called a concentrator seamlessly, as if they were standalone devices on the network. The same technique used to model embedded devices can be used to bridge between protocol islands, either using the same or different types of communication protocols, or to integrate backend systems into the network. You’ll learn to create a concentrator embedding both your sensor and actuator functionality into one single physical device. You’ll also learn how you can interact with these embedded devices and how they can be provisioned just as if they were standalone devices.

Chapter 13, Using an Internet of Things Service Platform, shows how an IoT Service Platform can help you with many of the repetitive tasks required to create a successful IoT application. It introduces the IoT Gateway project, its architecture and hardware abstraction layer, security infrastructure, and its management interfaces. You’ll learn how to create services running on the IoT Gateway, how to use its databases for persistence, how to interface things, and use its hosting environment.

Chapter 14, IoT Harmonization, introduces a standardization effort to harmonize the wide range of technologies used in the field of Internet of Things, with the goal of creating an infrastructure for the Smart City. It reviews the vision of a Smart City and identifies the main driving forces and requirements for reaching the vision. The chapter gives an overview of the required new standards and new business roles.

Chapter 15, Security for the Internet of Things, motivates the reader to add security for the Internet of Things from the beginning, integrating it into the fabric of the design and architecture, and not adding it later, as an add-on, in case it is needed. It provides a general introduction to the problem, reviews common attack surfaces, and presents some common counter measures.

Chapter 16, Privacy, introduces privacy, and why it matters. It presents new modern privacy legislation, and how technology presented in this book can be used to protect the privacy.

Apart from a computer running Windows, Linux, or Mac OS, you will need three Raspberry Pi 2 model B credit-card-sized computers or later, with 16 GB SD cards containing the Windows 10 IoT operating system installed. The first chapter lists the components used to build the circuits used in the examples presented in the book as well as the applications needed to build the projects. The source code for all the projects presented in this book is available for download from GitHub at https://github.com/PeterWaher/MIoT.

This book is for students, developers, or electronics engineers who want an introduction to the Internet of Things, or for professionals who want to deepen their understanding and explore the possibilities of different technologies for the Internet of Things and the Smart City. With only a rudimentary understanding of electronics (high school level), Raspberry Pi or similar credit-card-sized computers, and some programming experience using managed code such as C# or Java or object-oriented languages such as C++, you will be taught to develop state-of-the-art solutions for the Internet of Things in an instant.

<Capabilities>
    <Capability Name="internetClient" />
    <DeviceCapability Name="serialcommunication">
        <Device Id="any">
            <Function Type="name:serialPort" />
        </Device>
    </DeviceCapability>
</Capabilities>

<Capabilities>
    <Capability Name="internetClient" />
<DeviceCapability Name="serialcommunication">
        <Device Id="any">
            <Function Type="name:serialPort" />
        </Device>
    </DeviceCapability>
</Capabilities>

$ sudo apt-get udpate 
$ sudo apt-get upgrade 
$ sudo apt-get install mono-complete

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