Vision and Challenges for Realising the Internet of Things

tennae, on chip antennae (OCA), coil on chip, printed antennae, embedded antennae and multiple
antenna using different substrates and 3D structures).
4.2 Energy sustainability
A strong emphasis will be put on energy efficient and self-sustainable systems. Novel ways to
harvest energy from the environment must be explored and developed, in order to create systems
that require little external energy, if any. Efficiency in processing and in communication
must also be achieved through novel programming paradigms and the further development of
energy efficient protocols and smart antennae.
Research efforts will focus on multimodal identifiable sensing systems enabling complex applications
such as implants monitoring vital signs inside the body and drug delivery using
RFID and harvesting the energy from different sources.
Research on printed batteries manufactured with sensors, thin film solar (thermal) cells for
energy harvesting, vibration and piezoceramic devices for energy harvesting, (or even micro
fuel cells for long term power generation) wireless power supply to sensors and thin batteries
with a life of 10 years.
4.3 Privacy and Security
Many of today's concerns about the wide adoption of the IoT lie in the popular belief that both
privacy and security will be at risk. In order to reverse this belief, sound technological solutions
must be developed, together with legislators at national and supra-national level. Extensive
dissemination of the results of these discussions must also be undertaken by all IoT actors.
The research will focus on RFID with privacy control and energy efficient cryptography algorithms
and using non-linkable digital transfers for disguising digital transactions. Combining
different identification technologies to increase the security and privacy by using private,
revocable ID to enable users to be the sole owners of an object's identity.
4.4 Harsh Environments and Integration into Materials
Current trends show that the research process from application specific antenna design to
smart antennae, suitable in different applications and materials, will finally lead to the integration
of devices into non standard substrates. These substrates, and their operational fields,
might have very specific requirements, and the resilience of these smart electronic components
must therefore be extremely high.
Research will focus on RFID devices with sensing capabilities that are embedded in composite
parts, by using antennae, integrated electronics, micro sensors, materials and special assembly
techniques for operation in harsh environments (large temperature, pressure variations, etc)
or implanted, requiring biocompatible functionality.
5 Future outlook
The Internet of Things will change our society, and will bring seamless 'anytime, anywhere'
business, entertainment and social networking over fast reliable and secure networks. This
means the end of the divide between digital, virtual and physical worlds.
In this new context technical architecture that addresses point of control issues for tracking
objects across networks, companies and business processes will become essential. Simple,
distributed, architectures to enable multiple identifier authorities supporting the interests of
local, regional and national business, policymakers, and individuals and addresses concerns
over security and privacy will be the answer.
Today, the web services are standard and widely adopted technology for the Internet. The
future Internet will bring new challenges where the wireless identifiable embedded systems at
the edge of the network need to have and utilise similar functionalities.
Wireless identifiable devices and embedded distributed systems will implement service oriented
architectures to solve the complexity of distributed embedded applications and propagate
web services as a cross domain technology.
Wireless sensor networks and ubiquitous networks, where the sensors will be connected to
and controlled by embedded systems will use this approach, where services encapsulate the
functionality and provide unified access to the functionality of the system through a middleware
layer.
CERP-IoT – Cluster of European Research Projects on the Internet of Things
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