Scenarios and applications in a Things as a service environment

Recent advances of device manufacturing and communication technologies create the basis for an exponential grow of new devices with Internet connection in the next years. This will provide an unprecedented opportunity to create applications and services that go far beyond the mere purpose of each participant, as enabled by the interactions in this so-called Internet of Things (IoT). IoT applications that are growing with an increasing tendency, involve control and monitoring functions, where human-in-the-loop actions are not required. As a matter of fact, the only reason for having many of these applications is to remove human intervention for improved efficiency, security, and safety. The scenarios and applications we present in this paper are based on a novel architecture based on a so-called Things as a Service model enabling a Machine-to-Machine (M2M) environment, which will create a bridge between the real world (made of sensors, actuators, tags that are pervasive in our lives) and the virtual world (the Internet and its associated services).