2
Internet of Things (IoT)
This chapter briefly introduces the concept of Internet of Things (IoT) illustrating the basic
concepts of cloud, its definition, the various type of implementations and the network
aspect of IoT.
Second part of the chapter also briefly introduces the Cisco Packet Tracer tool.
2.1
History and evolution of IoT
According to Gartner studies [1], amount of connected IoT connected devices, excluding
computers, smartphones and tablets, will reach more than 20 billion, largely overpassing
the human world population.
The origin of
“cloud” term is not clear, the early concept of cloud and shares services
dates back in the sixties [2]. The first concept was referring to a vague and yet distant
future in which the computing would occur in few and remote locations without much
human intervention and where the services would be equally distributed among the pub-
lic users.
One example of early concepts can be traced back on 1961, when computer scientist
John McCharty proposed the first concept of “computer public utility”:
“If computers of the kind I have advocated become the computer of the futures, then
computing may someday be organized as a public utility just as the telephone system is
a public utility. … the computer utility could become the basis of a new and important
industry” [2].
Another important statement was published by Leonard Kleinrock in 1969 (Chief scientist
of the Advanced Research Project Agency Network or ARPANET) strengthening the
concept of public utility:
“As of now, computer networks are still in the infancy, but as they grew up and they
become sophisticated, we will probably see the spread of “computer utilities” [3].
6
In the same year J.C.R. Licklider (Responsible for enabling development in ARPANET)
also introduced
the idea of “intergalactic computer network” visioning for everyone in the
globe to be interconnected and accessing programs and data from anywhere.
” [4]
The term “cloud” itself, over the modern years, has been also commonly used to describe
and refer to different technologies. For example in the early 1990s the term was, and still
is, used by the network industry to refer to an abstract layer to deliver data in heteroge-
neous public and semi-public networks.
The term “could” in computing was also used to describe platforms for distributed com-
puting (Wired’s magazine April 1994). [2]
A big milestone in the cloud computing history was reached in the 1999 when Sale-
force.com pioneered the concept of enterprise remote provisioned software via website.
[2][3]
The next milestone was in 2002 when Amazon.com released the Amazon Web Service
(AWS), which provided a suite of enterprise-oriented services that included, remote pro-
visioned computing processing power, storage and other business functionalities. [2][3]
In 2006 another big step on the computing cloud history was marked. Amazon released
its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) services, enabling organizations and private to
“lease”
computing power in order to run their own applications. Few years later, in 2009, the
Google App Engine was also released. [2][3]
These two services forged the modern cloud computing concept.
Cloud computing success has been also enabled by several key factor such as maturity
of virtualization technology, wide-spread of low latency high-speed networks, cost reduc-
tion of power processing and storage space.
Exploring these concepts is out of scope for this thesis work.
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