The Internet of Things

Heinrich Stüttgen, the vice president of NEC Laboratories Europe, brought a unique and valuable perspective to the Challenges in Computing conference, as the only speaker from the commercial sector. His topic, the Internet of Things, was, however, quite familiar to the other attendees. The idea behind the Internet of Things is that each of us owns more and more devices that contain possibly multiple sensors, which can be used not only to inform us about the rest of the world, but also to inform the rest of the world about us. Smartphones contain GPS locators and accelerometers; automobiles contain sensors that can interact, for example, with emergency services or with toll booths; electric ‘smart meters’ can track our power usage and inform us (and the utility company) about the cost of our energy usage in real time; and many industries use radio-frequency identification (RFID) sensors to track shipments or inventories. What all of these current-day applications have in common is that they are all islands, ‘intranets of things’, rather than one connected ‘Internet of Things’, as Stüttgen put it in his lecture. However, the day is coming soon when these applications will begin to go online. The size of the Internet will suddenly grow from 1 billion people (estimated) today to 2 billion people and 5 billion phones and 2 billion RFID tags and 1 billion cars. And that is even before you start counting the smart teapots and the smart toothbrushes. ‘According to Wikipedia, 50 to 100 trillion objects could have sensors’, Stüttgen said.