Internet of Things — A paradigm shift of future Internet applications

Internet has emerged as a medium to connect people across the world for emailing, conferencing, on-line trading, gaming and so on. Internet of Things (IoT) is aimed at making daily lives more sophisticated, flexible and highly reachable to any objects across the world. In IoT, physical objects such as home appliances, vehicles, supply chain items, containers etc. will have digital identities and they will be context aware to sense the environment around them and interact with each other. The objects will be able to respond with the information useful for real-time decision making such as safely changing the lane while driving, automatically switching off the lights in a room when no one is around and so on. Effective monitoring of the environmental conditions to control issues such as pollution, disaster and global warming is another important objective of IoT. For IoT, objects are required to be made smart by embedding intelligence into them using technologies such as Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) and Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID). In addition to mobile communication technology, Internet will be the primary backbone of the communication channel of IoT. As Internet is a public (and insecure) channel, security is an important concern in IoT infrastructure to communicate the voluminous information across the globe in a secure and timely manner. In this paper, we discuss the potential scope of IoT, the major technologies involved in IoT infrastructure and some important application domains for IoT. We also discuss the security and privacy issues of two important technologies of IoT, namely, WSN and RFID.