Rather than network of people, Internet of Things (IoT) is network that connect things. It is an interconnection of uniquely identifiable embedded computing devices. It enables things to access data and communicate with one another. Humans will continue to use Internet, but the future Internet will also be a pipeline for non-human devices – Machine to Machine (M2M) communication. When one connects any type of devices, tons of data will be generated. The promise of IoT is that more automatic and more intelligent services provided by interconnected smart devices will be prevalent with minimal amount of human interaction. Most of the things connected to IoT are actually simple devices that are referred to as smart devices. The devices become smart when joined together with other devices. The whole is greater than sum of its parts, because everything is communicating with everything else in an intelligent and automated fashion. Any given device connects to other surrounding and relevant devices to share collected data. This creates what experts call ambient intelligence, which results when multiple devices act in unison to carry out everyday activities and tasks using the information and intelligence embedded into the network. IoT connects the individual devices to network and to each other. The network is also connected to software and services that analyze data collected by connected devices and use that data to make decisions and initiate actions from same or other devices. The backbone for IoT is the network. To build IoT, experts envision 3 stages – a. Stage 1: Device Proliferation and Connection – More and more consumer devices are connectable, from fitness trackers to television to thermostats. These devices connect wirelessly to the Internet. b. Stage 2: Making Things Work Together – The data from one device is transmitted to a second device, which then makes some sort of decision and initiates a given operation. This stage is about automating simple tasks and programming the necessary devices to do that. c. Stage 3: Developing Intelligent Applications – To take advantage of vast amounts of data collected from IoT, we need applications that can act on larger, more complex and often more obscure data sets. In the world of IoT, each device no matter what its size will be assigned a distinct Internet Protocol (IP) address. Under the IPv4 addressing scheme, the large number of devices that need to connect will exceed available number of IP addresses. The way out is to use IPv6. This new protocol allows 2128 unique IP addresses and permits full scale implementation of IoT. It expands number of available IP addresses by moving from a 32-bit addressing to 128-bit addressing. In the IoT ecosystem, there are some wireless protocols that will be used to develop and implement smart cities across the globe. This chapter discusses five key wireless protocols in detail. The protocols are – 6LoWPAN, ZigBee, BLE, CoAP and MQTT. The key features, operations, security, packet formats, architecture, design principles, networking basics and few differences of these protocols are explained in a clear and concise fashion
