Internet of Things: Possibilities and Challenges

Internet of Things (IoT) is a novel approach of connecting things/objects and thus transmitting information between various entities of the physical world or to the control centers where this information can be interpreted. IoT has been poised as the next evolution of internet promising to change our lives by involving a seamless access to people and devices in a ubiquitous way leading to a smart world. These devices, often referred to as smart items or intelligent things can be home appliances, healthcare devices, vehicles, buildings, factories and almost anything networked and fitted with sensors, actuators, and/or embedded computers. IoT promises to make the world smarter and proactive by enabling things to talk and others to understand. This work first presents an insight into the origin of IoT and its network as well as data centric architecture while listing the major possibilities. The seemingly important role and challenges of using Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) which acts as the base in sensing and monitoring has been discussed. Since, the future lies in utility computing, best realized in the form of cloud computing, a cloud centric view of IoT is also presented.