2 Between Big Brother, Matrix and Wall Street: The Challenges of a Sustainable Roadmap for the Internet of Things

2
  Between Big Brother, Matrix and Wall Street:
   The Challenges of a Sustainable Roadmap
           for the Internet of Things

                             Alessandro Bassi

2.1 Introduction
The path to success for a fully-fledged implementation of intercommunicat-
ing objects has quite a few roadblocks, belonging to different areas, such as
sociology, technology, and business.
    The original, main goal of the precursor of the Internet (the ARPAnet)
was resilience. Back 40 years ago, architectural choices were made in order
to provide the highest robustness, as the network was designed to sustain a
nuclear strike: the centrality of the IP protocol, a connectionless, unreliable
network protocol, and packet-switching at hop points provided unprecedented
robustness, allowing the original ARPAnet to grow up to the current size. The
military support for the TCP/IP protocol suite helped to secure the develop-
ment of the original network. Later on, universities were allowed to take on
the development of the network, following the original design of connecting
network nodes and not having a fixed path between two endpoints.
    However, as the complexity of Internet grew, due to a large increase in the
heterogeneity of connected devices and services, novel architectural models
were developed and applied: Overlay networks and autonomic management
are just two main examples of solutions implemented in order to cope with
the size and diversity of today’s internet.

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2 Between Big Brother, Matrix and Wall Street

    With the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT), though, all man-
agement and orchestration mechanisms developed for today’s networks are
highly insufficient in dealing with the vast amounts of information that
small connected objects are bound to generate when they become fully
deployed.
    Even though current Internet protocols are mostly proven to be scalable
and that the Internet community was rapidly able to provide solutions for any
problem that may emerge, many characteristics of the IoT are fundamentally
different, making the current Internet model inadequate. For example resource
constrains in IoT is reversing the phenomenon of software induced hardware
obsolescence. To date if software grows we just add hardware; within the IoT
boundaries, however, there is no possibility of over-provisioning hardware;
and software has to follow, which means that standard approaches to service
design are bound to fail. Another example is the area of security and privacy
due to the trend that hundreds or thousands of information objects will be
tightly integrated into all aspects of every single human. Access control and
management to information is an overwhelming endeavour for any individual,
so that totally new approaches are required.
    While there’s no single definition of IoT, we can assume that every object
that is identifiable, is able to sense the environment around it, and is able
to modify the environment, belongs to the IoT. To this end, IoT comprises
a digital overlay of information over a highly heterogeneous physical world
of objects. In the coming future, such objects are expected to outnumber the
human population by a factor of three. Therefore, it is paramount to improve the
best-known techniques for managing and orchestrating heterogeneous devices,
and develop new models and visions, that can cope with the complexity and
the scalability issues that the IoT will bring.

2.2 Sociological Issues
Currently, IoT technologies have a “Big Brother”-like image, mainly coming
for the usage of RFID identification means.
    The acceptance of IoT is strongly linked with basic privacy and per-
sonal data respect. Today, technologies that allow the identification of
objects, such as RFID, can be seen as violating the privacy regulations
of the European Union. There are literally hundreds of examples, from

2.3 Technological Challenges   3

health monitoring systems processing inhabitants’ sensitive data to payment
systems to commercial spam, that show how novel technologies could be
misused.
     Therefore, a prerequisite for trust and acceptance of these systems is that
appropriate data protection measures are put in place against possible misuse
and other personal data related risks.
     For some experts, efforts in this sense are superfluous, as they argue that
the uptake of IoT will change our perception of privacy, citing as evidence the
amount of information that people, and especially the younger generations,
are willing to display publicly on social networks, and the global uptake of
technologies such as mobile phones and credit cards, able to track any of our
habits, at any time. However, while the above argument is not unreasonable,
it is common opinion that is the need to develop novel information security
mechanisms, if for anything, just in case social trends or legislation change.
As a reminder, the TCP/IP protocol suite was developed in the early 70, and
we can easily affirm that the original team was not imagining the current
deployment of the protocol suite they were designing at that time.
     As in any other field, applying privacy and security as a patch after the
design phase leads invariably to less-than-satisfactory results and cumbersome
architectures. As IoT can still be considered in his infancy, developing archi-
tectures with those clear goals in mind is not only good practice, but also will
likely save an enormous amount of effort afterwards.
     Regarding security issues, the main difference between the IoT and the
Internet is in the computational capabilities and in the easiness of possible
attacks. While the Internet is somehow a closed system, composed of devices
having rather large computation and storage facilities, allowing complex fire-
wall and secure architecture at entry-points, an ubiquitous IoT will have bil-
lions of possible entry points to secure, Moreover, as the devices normally have
very limited computational and storage power, there is limited possibilities of
running complex software.

2.3 Technological Challenges
Given the complexity of the IoT paradigm, involving the coexistence of many
types of devices, communications and networking technologies, applications,
and the list of technological challenges to be addressed is potentially very long.

4 Between Big Brother, Matrix and Wall Street

2.3.1 Energy Management
Energy in all its phases (harvesting, conservation and consumption) is a major
issue, not only in the IoT area, but more in general for the society at large. The
development of novel solutions that maximize energy efficiency is paramount.
In this respect, current technology development is inadequate, and existing
processing power and energy capacity is too low to cope with future needs.
    The development of new and more efficient and compact energy storage
sources such as batteries, fuel cells, and printed/polymer batteries, together
with new energy generation devices coupling energy transmission methods or
energy harvesting using energy conversion, as well as extremely low-power
circuitry and energy efficient architectures and protocol suites, will be the key
factors for the roll out of autonomous wireless smart systems.
    Research efforts will focus on multimodal identifiable sensing systems
enabling complex applications such as implants monitoring vital signs inside
the body and drug delivery using RFID, whilst harvesting energy from different
sources.

2.3.2 Communication Fabric
The existence of several mechanisms and protocol suites developed to transfer
information between peers within what can be indicted at large as intercommu-
nicating objects area is similar, in many ways, to the beginning of the Internet.
More than twenty years ago, different technologies were developed to transfer
data efficiently between somehow homogeneous computing machines; most
of those efforts have been abandoned, and the TCP/IP protocol suite emerged
as the main information carrier for the Web.
    Objects need to speak a common language, if the Internet of Things wants
to provide a useful fabric for the development of services and applications.
Therefore, the IoT must find a “narrow waist,” similar to the IP protocol for the
Internet, in order to provide a seamless communication flow between entities,
intended as devices or services. While it is arguable where, in the protocol
stack, this narrow waist will be, which protocols will belong to it, and through
which channels devices will be able to interoperate, we are convinced that IoT
will not happen without a single, uniform, and universal view.
    The different communication protocols and mechanisms, such as Blue-
tooth, Zigbee, WiFi, WiMAX, or NFC were all developed with a specific

2.3 Technological Challenges   5

target in mind. These protocols follow a different concept: while Internet is the
network of networks, they are more suited to a so-called “Intranet of Things,”
where solutions are applicable for a single problem, missing the generality
that distinguish the TCP/IP protocol suite.
    The creation of a generic Yet-Another-Wireless-Protocol is probably
doomed to fail; instead, as TCP/IP was not created by scratch, an evolution of
current protocols, with the extension of some protocols, the creation of gate-
ways between different stacks, and the development of cross-protocol routing
elements will provide the necessary uniform communication fabric that guar-
antees device interoperability.

2.3.3 Beyond IoT-A: Scaling Up the IoT
The Internet of Things Architecture (IoT-A) project aims at developing a ref-
erence architectural model able to provide a uniform view or the future IoT.
IoT-A covers technological issues varying from low level hardware issues such
as common cryptographic algorithms, protocols and communication mecha-
nisms, addressing and naming schemes, up to high level protocol integra-
tion issues such as machine-to-machine (M2M) interfaces and plug-and-play
objects recognition and configuration, while aspects related to the integration
of IoT in the generalized context of user services are beyond scope. To this
end, there is a need of complementing the IoT-A architecture by focusing on
the definition of a uniform service interface to enable generic integration of the
interconnected object functions in the context of user services, taking special
care of preserving their autonomous operation capability.
    In addressing these requirements it seems necessary to adopt the auto-
nomic communications paradigm that allows self-∗ properties to be designed,
implemented and deployed thus creating a thin, modular, and autonomic mid-
dleware layer in-between the user applications layer and the underlying IoT-A
network architecture, wherein autonomic algorithms can be readily deployed
as generic means for service implementation and objects management. Such
autonomic properties can be either generic, taking care of common manage-
ment and orchestration object operations or context-specific driven from sev-
eral application domains.
    In addition, the vast volumes of generated information give rise to an
information service as constituent of the autonomic layer that conceptually

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interconnects objects and IoT applications. Such a service must be capable
of modelling, identifying, searching, retrieving, aggregating and delivering
information requested by any entity (application or object) in a way that is
compatible with the entity’s interface, thus advancing interoperability in IoT.
    This development is also a necessity for business development. As orches-
tration and management mechanisms can shape future business models, and
create new actors and modify greatly the value chain, a special attention needs
to be put on those issues.

2.3.4 From Objects to Smart Things: Integrating Capabilities
      into Materials
The integration of chips and antennas into non-standard substrates like textiles
and paper, or even metal laminates and new substrates with conducting paths
and bonding materials adapted to harsh environments and for environmen-
tally friendly disposal, will become a mainstream technology. RFID inlays
with a strap coupling structure will be used to connect the integrated cir-
cuit chip and antenna in order to produce a variety of shapes and sizes of
labels, instead of direct mounting. Inductive or capacitive coupling of specif-
ically designed strap-like antennas will avoid galvanic interconnection and
thus increase reliability and allow even faster production processes. The tar-
get must be to physically integrate the RFID structure with the material of
the object to be identified, in such a way as to enable the object to physically
act as the antenna. This will require ultra-thin structures (

2.5 Future Works   7

of capital investments to create the snowball effect typical of technological
revolutions.
    Currently, IoT is seen almost uniquely as service enabler, similar to the
smart phone market, where the “killer application” came from the ecosystems
of applets available for commercially successful platforms such as the iPhone,
Blackberry and Android. However, IoT has the power of changing the inner
structure of business: Not only creating new high-end services over known
platforms but allowing radically new business models. In the same mobile
world used as a base for IoT business models, the very emergence of mobile
communication and the possibility of using underlying technologies in a dif-
ferent way than originally thought. Voice-over-IP is a clear example of this:
while packet-switching emerged as a main data carrier mechanism, in con-
trast with typical circuit-switching technologies used for voice, it is now used
to carry “voice packets” at a fraction of the price, if charging at all, that old
operators used to charge for international communications. This had a huge
impact on business models of traditional telecom operators, and forced them
to change their business model to survive.
    Moreover, the possibility of uniquely identifying any object will allow
easier renting and co-owning of many different objects. A typical example can
be a drill: a device that is bought for 100 Euro or more, and used very rarely.
Considering the average cost-per-use, the price of each hole ever made by the
drill is huge — without considering the space occupied in the cellar. Therefore,
many objects we currently own but use very seldom can be co-owned or rented,
creating new services and new actors, if they could be uniquely identified and
their usefulness verified at any time. Identification technologies such as RFID,
and sensors could effectively realise true pay-per-use schemes, which can also
be successful because of a different social attitude that can be seen from the
success of Facebook and other social networks.

2.5 Future Works
The Internet of Things needs effort in many directions in order to achieve
a full implementation. First of all, technical issues need to be convincingly
addressed, and efforts in this sense have already been made by the Euro-
pean Commission in recent calls of the Framework Programme 7. Technol-
ogy advances will then enable new business models, that have to be developed

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together with convincing adoption plans. Last but not least, governance issues
must be solved at National and European level, developing the sense in EU
citizens that the IoT revolution will not bring any threat, but significant advan-
tages to the population. All these advances will not be possible without a clear
engagement and common roadmaps from the private and the public sector for
the foreseeable future.