Abstract
Things are the core of the Internet of Things (IoT) and must be properly characterized according to the different functions they accomplish. Identifying their capabilities and combining them as sets provides a view on the single or joint properties of existing things and guide in properly designing and building new things while maximizing their potential benefits within an IoT system or application. Building on five essential but independent capabilities of things (Identification, Localization, Sensing, Actuation, and Processing), four categories or groups of things are defined. These groups comprise a particular view of the diversity of objects found in the IoT, as trackable, data, interactive, or smart objects. In this paper, a description of the aforementioned capabilities is presented, stating how each of the groups of objects includes them. Then, given that data are the most important assets for both organizations and individuals a further description of the data objects group is made, proposing a graphical categorization framework that thoroughly describes and measures the level in which each of these capabilities is contained and how it contributes to the performance and data properties of any data object.
Highlights
The Internet of Things (IoT) has been regarded as one of the disruptive technologies of the 21st century [1]
High levels of sensing capabilities (SC) and location capability (LC) are present in Data intensive objects which are common in personal health devices or environmental monitors; Identification Capability (IC) is high while LC and processing capabilities (PC) can range from medium to low levels in Trusted objects, as usually observed in security devices; Ready-touse Data Objects (DO) have strong PC with mid to high levels of SC and LC, as found in devices that integrate some type of biometric recognition or authentication
The framework was applied to a pair of IoT devices, one of them in a fictitious system and the other a commercial IoT air quality monitor
Summary
The Internet of Things (IoT) has been regarded as one of the disruptive technologies of the 21st century [1]. Some things are digital objects that can be tracked through space and time and contain the data history related to the specific object they represent [14]; others are physical objects enhanced with small electronic devices allowing them to obtain data from the environment, process such data, temporarily store them, and send them to the Internet [15]–[17] In some cases, they might act on the environment via embedded actuators, and there are objects that may provide the user with ways to interact with an application, system, and even among different things [13].
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