Top ten hurdles on the race towards the Internet of Things
Authors: Meddeb Aref 
Published: November 2013

While the Internet is continuously growing and unavoidable moving towards an ubiquitous internetworking technology, ranging from casual data exchange, home entertainment, security, military, healthcare, transportation, and business applications, to the Internet of Things (IoT) where anything can communicate anywhere, anytime, there is an increasing and urgent need to define global standards for future Internet architectures as well as service definitions. In the Future, the Internet will perhaps become the most exciting entertainment mean. It is very likely that we would be able to make 3D conferencing at home, using holographic projection, spatial sound and haptic transmission. Further, we may no longer use traditional devices such as laptop and desktop computers and cell phones. Monitors and speakers will be completely different ranging from 3D-glasses and headsets to 3D-contact lenses, and in-ear wireless earphones. Keyboard and mouse will disappear as well and will be replaced by biometrics such as voice, iris and finger print recognition, and movement detection. Many projects are being proposed to support and promote the Internet of Things worldwide, ranging from Initiatives (http://www.iot-i.eu/public), Alliances (http://www.ipso-alliance.org/), Forums (http://www.iot-forum.eu/), Consortiums (http://iofthings.org/), Architectures (http://www.iot-a.eu/), Research Clusters (http://www.internet-of-things-research.eu/), and the list goes on. There is seemingly a race towards the leadership on the Internet of things, to the extent that often, driven by "time-to-market" constraints and business requirements, most proposals made so far fail to consider all facets required to deliver the expected services, and often lead to ambiguous and even contradictory definitions of what the Internet of Things is meant to be. For example, some proposals assimilate IoT to Web 3.0, while others claim it is primarily based on RFID and systems alike. Between web semantics and cognitive radio communications, there is a huge gap that needs to be filled out by adequate communication, security, and application software and hardware. Unfortunately, so far, there is no general consensus on the most suitable underlying technology and applications that will help the Internet of Things become a reality. In this presentation, we describe ten of the most challenging hurdles that IoT actors need to face in order to reach their goals. Among these hurdles, we identify the top-ten issues as 1) how to safely migrate from IPv4 to IPv6 given the proliferation of IPv4 devices, 2) Regulation, Pricing and Neutrality of the Future Internet, 3) OAM tools required for accounting and monitoring Future Internet Services, 4) Future Quality of Service definitions and mechanisms, 5) Reliability of Future Internet Services, 6) Future Security Challenges, 7) Scalability of the Internet of Things with its billions of interworked devices, 8) Future Access (local loop) technologies, 9) Future Transport (long distance) telecommunication technologies, and 10) Future End-user Devices and Applications. We aim to briefly explain and highlight the impact of each one of these issues on the service delivery in the context of the Internet of things. We also intend to describe some existing and promising solutions available so far.