The Internet of Things and the Age of Spime

摘要

The Internet of Things as it has become known refers to a vision of an Internet in which not only is anyone connected, anywhere and anytime, but so too is anything. It was back in 2005 that I chose the Internet of Things (loT) as the topic of a publication I edited for the ITU, part of the ITU Internet Reports series. This report identified four key technological enablers underlying this vision: the tagging of things through auto ID technologies like RFID, sensing things through sensors and actuators, shrinking things through developments in miniaturization and thinking things through increasingly embedded processing power. In an Internet of Things environment, previously disparate devices, networks and everyday things come together in a converged form, providing a ubiquitous communication experience for the user. The loT is a high-level concept that has taken the original universality of the Internet to its logical conclusion.