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.
This chapter introduces concepts on cooperating objects and wireless sensor net-
works that will be used in the following chapters. It also introduces the Embedded
WiSeNts Coordination Action. Finally, it presents an overview of the book and the
relations between the following chapters.
