Colloquium Loria Antonio Iera

Years have passed by since the Internet of Things (IoT) has appeared on the scene, becoming one of the major research and industrial subject in the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) arena. Its pervasiveness today has assumed dimensions rarely achieved in the past by other ICT themes, so as to raise the doubt whether it is more a “trendy” term, speculatively ridden to increase the attention on studies and products around mature technologies, rather than a real element of technological discontinuity with respect to the past. 

 

This doubt comes also from the fact that, in spite of its huge success, what IoT really represents is not completely clear yet. Often, solutions and paradigms that rely on very dissimilar technologies are included under the common umbrella of the IoT. All this noise around the phenomenon has increased the confusion so that it has become necessary to shed light on it and come to a definition, shared by the whole community, of what IoT is and what is not.

This talk aims at (i) presenting the evolution of the IoT paradigm and highlighting how the emerging computing and communication paradigms (e.g., 5G networking, Social Networks, Cloud/Fog/Edge computing, etc.) are transforming the IoT in terms of architectures, technologies and protocols, and (ii) giving a modern definition of the IoT phenomenon by pointing out the differences between IoT and the technologies often confused with it (Sensors, RFID, M2M, etc).