Smart City Networks: Through the InterNET of Things is composed of research
results, analyses, and ideas, which focus on a diversity of interconnected factors
relating with urbanization, its “smartness,” and overarching “InterNET of things
(IoT).” The latter refers to interconnected objects and devices – through compu-
tational operations – which can receive signals and actuate systems.
The InterNET of Things is considered to be the next big opportunity, and challenge, for the
InterNET engineering community, users of technology, companies and society as a whole. It
involves connecting embedded devices such as sensors, home appliances, weather stations
and even toys to InterNET Protocol (IP) based networks. The number of IP-enabled embedded
devices is increasing rapidly, and although hard to estimate, will surely outnumber the
number of personal computers (PCs) and servers in the future. With the advances made over
the past decade in microcontroller,low-power radio, battery and microelectronic technology,
the trend in the industry is for smart embedded devices (called smart objects) to become
IP-enabled, and an integral part of the latest services on the InterNET. These services are no
longer cyber, just including data created by humans, but are to become very connected to the
physical world around us by including sensor data, the monitoring and control of machines,
and other kinds of physical context. We call this latest frontier of the InterNET, consisting of
wireless low-power embedded devices, the Wireless Embedded InterNET. Applications that
this new frontier of the InterNET enable are critical to the sustainability, efficiency and safety
of society and include home and building automation, healthcare, energy efficiency, smart
grids and environmental monitoring to name just a few.
With the proliferation of cloud computing and InterNET online services, more and
more data and computation are migrated to geographical distributed InterNET data
centers (IDCs), which can provide reliability, management, and cost benefits.
However, IDC operators encounter several major problems in IDC operations, such
as huge energy consumption and energy cost, and high carbon emission. To deal
with the above problems, IDC operators have to efficiently manage the way of
energy consumption and energy supply. Considering the potential of smart grid, we
focus on the energy management of IDCs in smart grid from several perspectives,
i.e., power outage, carbon emission, heterogeneous service delay guarantees, and
operation risk.
InterNET of Things (IoT) [26] is a new networking paradigm for cyber-physical
systems that allow physical objects to collect and exchange data. In the IoT, physical
objects and cyber-agents can be sensed and controlled remotely across existing
network infrastructure, which enables the integration between the physical world
and computer-based systems and therefore extends the InterNET into the real world.
IoT can find numerous applications in smart housing, environmental monitoring,
medical and health care systems, agriculture, transportation, etc. Because of its
significant application potential, IoT has attracted a lot of attention from both
academic research and industrial development.
With more than two billion terminals in commercial operation world-wide, wire-
less and mobile technologies have enabled a first wave of pervasive communication
systems and applications. Still, this is only the beginning as wireless technologies
such as RFID are currently contemplated with a deployment potential of tens of
billions of tags and a virtually unlimited application potential. A recent ITU report
depicts a scenario of “InterNET of things” — a world in which billions of objects will
report their location, identity, and history over wireless connections.
