The Internet of Things Moves into the Cloud
Antonio Iera, Giacomo Morabito, Luigi Atzori · 2016
This tutorial has three main objectives: (1) Providing insights into the evolution that the IoT has gone through since its introduction. The idea of IoT has evolved over time with the advent of new enabling technologies: new concepts, such as cloud computing, information centric networking, big data, and social networking, have already partially impacted and still are impacting on this paradigm. This trend will surely continue, given the importance of the relevant applications. In this tutorial we will illustrate the evolution of the IoT classifying different generations and give a modern definition of the phenomenon. In this way the audience will become aware of the differences between IoT and the technologies often confused with it (such as sensor networks, RFID systems, M2M, etc.). (2) Presenting the role that Cloud computing technology can play in the support of the IoT. In the IoT most objects (even the smartest) do not have the (energy, processing, and communication) capabilities to run the services that users expect. Accordingly several solutions have been proposed to offload processing to the cloud. Several possibilities can be considered in this context depending on whether the cloud will just be the responsible for the storage, management, and retrieval of the data generated by smart objects or will provide the environment where virtualized digital instances of the objects and/or the service they offer will run. In this tutorial we will provide a critical overview of the most important solutions proposed so far in the literature. (3) Showing a practical example of cloud support for IoT objects and service virtualization in the cloud. Finally, we will present a specific solution for supporting IoT in the cloud. More specifically we will show the architecture, the tools utilized to virtualize objects, and the APIs offered to application developers. In this way most of the concepts depicted throughout the tutorial will be illustrated from a practical point of view.