Composition of advanced (μ)services for the next generation of the internet of things

Abstract

In recent years, technologies such as Machine to Machine (M2M) and the Internet of Things (IoT) have become core technologies of tomorrow’s world that probably we will go to inhabit. Potentially, everything that belongs to the environment around us is or will be connected, and it will produce data or provide services of some kind. The big penetration of technologies such as sensors, electronic tags, micro-controllers, etc., and the inexorable growth of the Internet, improve the understanding of the physical environment, from industrial buildings or the workplace, up to the farmland. The proliferation of all these devices, often able to host in a very small footprint, an entire TCP/IP stack, has meant that the M2M world was incorporated into the world IoT establishing an environment where things and people are able to communicate, share information and generate knowledge. It is now clear that to support the growth and development of a global network of devices connected in an autonomous way to the Internet and with the ability to communicate and exchange information between them, two key actors are need: first, the adoption of a technological standard that can “disconnect” the Things from a specific application, in order to shift towards application independent Things; and second, to transform Things into systems able to make decisions or support decisions. In our visionary paper, we will describe a high level software architecture based on features from embedded SIM (eSIM) technology and (μμ)services technology, in order to develop IoT systems of new generation, able to leverage on LTE or 3G cellular networks to combine services provided not only from the Cloud, but also by Things themselves, and from of them networks.