Internet of Things: The Way Ahead

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is among the latest Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) developments that is making the boundaries between reality and fiction vanish. According to Mark Weiser, "...The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it." [5]. The International Data Corporation (IDC) also mentions the huge spending on IoT that "...will increase by a compound annual growth rate of 13.6% from 2017 to 2022, reaching $1.2 trillion within the next four years"1. To sustain this rapid growth, IoT should overcome different obstacles such as diversity of things' development technologies and communication standards, users' reluctance and sometimes rejection due to things invading their privacy, lack of killer applications that demonstrate the necessity of things, lack of an IoT-oriented software engineering discipline, and finally, the passive nature of things. To address these obstacles, the research community is putting forward many solutions that would make things proactive and responsive to their cyber-physical surroundings. This should allow things for instance, to reach out to peers that expose collaborative behavior, to form dynamic alliances when necessary, to avoid peers that expose malicious behavior, and to be accountable for their actions. In this keynote presentation, we discuss our ongoing research agenda on IoT with focus on four initiatives: process-of-things [3], mutation-of-things [1], cloud-fog-things [2, 6], and finally, vetting-things [4].