Guest Editorial - Special Issue on Internet of Things (IoT): Architecture, Protocols and Services

The internet of things (IoT) has been emerging as the next big 'thing' in Internet. It is envisioned that billions of physical things or objects will be outfitted with different kinds of sensors and actuators and connected to the Internet via heterogeneous access networks enabled by technologies such as embedded sensing and actuating, radio frequency identification (RFID), wireless sensor networks, real-time and semantic web services, etc. IoT is actually cyber-physical systems or a network of networks. With the huge number of things/objects and sensors/actuators connected to the Internet, a massive and in some cases real-time data flow will be automatically produced by connected things and sensors. It is important to collect correct raw data in an efficient way; but more important is to analyze and mine the raw data to abstract more valuable information such as correlations among things and services to provide web of things or Internet of services. This special issue features recent and emerging advances IoT architecture, protocols, services and applications. More than one hundred papers were received and peer-reviewed, out of which thirty five papers were selected for publication, which cover topics including sensors and devices for IoT, efficient communications and networking for IoT, security and privacy in IoT, crowdsensing and crowdsourcing, localization and tracking, services and applications, and IoT data modeling and management. The first set of five papers discuss IoT sensor and device related issues. The second set includes fourteen papers about efficient communications and networking for IoT. Security and privacy is another important aspect in IoT. Five papers focusing on IoT security and privacy were selected. Four papers concentrating on tracking and localization were selected and three more papers about IoT data modeling and management were included in this special issue. Finally, there were three papers which presented new IoT services and applications.