Foreword

I grew up in a time when the Internet was used by computer science stu-
dents using Gopher to browse their course syllabus. We ran private
bulletin-board systems using ANSI text over 2400 baud modems over
fixed phone lines, and transfered news and mailing lists overnight through
USENET. Think of this as an analogy to where we have been with auto-
mation systems and M2M over the past decade. The same incredible
growth of people using the Internet in the 1990s is now being repeated by
things using the Internet in the 2010s.
It is wonderful to see this book published during the peak of the IoT
hype cycle, where most writing is in tweets and blog entries. The deploy-
ment of traditional IP networks, security technology and Web infrastruc-
ture requires a lot of knowledge and skill, and understanding the Internet
of Things requires a similar breadth of knowledge. Today we take that
knowledge for granted because we have trained the world through books
and teaching over several decades. Luckily most of the knowledge we
have gained from building today’s Internet and Web services can be
applied to IoT. There are, however, many aspects of IoT technologies that
are new, including IPv6 over low-power networks, new applications of
TLS security, efficient web transfer protocols and techniques for managing
and using devices through commonly understood data objects.
System and network architects, administrators and software developers
will find this book useful as an overview of IoT architecture and technol-
ogy. At the same time, business and product managers will find the book
useful as an introduction to the market segments, applications and require-
ments as input for a successful IoT product or service. Finally, the technol-
ogy overview is a great starting place to find the information needed to
dive deeper into a particular area, and the architecture overview covers a
wide range of design paradigms. One important point made is that without
trust and security built into IoT technology and systems in a holistic way,
we will not see an Internet of Things, but continue to see silos of things.
The technology is available today to build an Internet of Things where
devices and services can be developed and deployed for the benefit is soci-
ety and industry as a whole. The challenge now is for us to educate
people.

Zach Shelby
Directory of Technology for IoT
ARM Inc.
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