(MDPI AG, 2013-04-25) Ishaq, Isam; Carels, David; Teklemariam, Girum; Abeele, Floris; De Poorter, Eli
Smart embedded objects will become an important part of what is called the
Internet of Things. However, the integration of embedded devices into the Internet
introduces several challenges, since many of the existing Internet technologies and
protocols were not designed for this class of devices. In the past few years, there have been
many efforts to enable the extension of Internet technologies to constrained devices.
Initially, this resulted in proprietary protocols and architectures. Later, the integration of
constrained devices into the Internet was embraced by IETF, moving towards standardized
IP-based protocols. In this paper, we will briefly review the history of integrating
constrained devices into the Internet, followed by an extensive overview of IETF
standardization work in the 6LoWPAN, ROLL and CoRE working groups. This is
complemented with a broad overview of related research results that illustrate how this
work can be extended or used to tackle other problems and with a discussion on open
issues and challenges. As such the aim of this paper is twofold: apart from giving readers
solid insights in IETF standardization work on the Internet of Things, it also aims to
encourage readers to further explore the world of Internet-connected objects, pointing to
future research opportunities.