Design And Realization Of Winternet: From Net Of Things To Internet Of Things

In recent years, Internet of Things (IoT) has attracted great attention from academia, industry, and government. IoT is considered to be a networking infrastructure that can connect enormous physical objects and has great potential to extend mankind's capabilities in monitoring, analyzing, and controlling the physical space using cyber technologies. Extensive studies on IoT have been carried out and many IoT prototype systems have been built. However, most of these systems are usually suitable for domain-specific applications and operate in a local region. They are really "Nets of Things (NoT)" as they miss mechanisms for large-scale interconnection. As such, how to build a globally interconnected IoT is still an open problem. In this article, by reviewing the development of the Internet, we derive a pathway that may lead to successful development and deployment of a global IoT. We propose and examine a novel IoT architecture, namely, WInternet, which aims at interconnecting small-scale domain-specific NoTs into a globally connected IoT.