WInternet: From Net of Things to Internet of Things

In recently years, Internet of things (IoT) has attracted great attentions from academic, industry, and the government. IoT is considered to be a network that can connect billions of physical objects together, and has great potential in extending human beings capability in monitoring, analyzing, and controlling the physical space using cyber technologies. Extensive IoT research has been done. Large number of IoT systems have been built and applied successfully. However, the development of IoT is facing several fundamental issues, such as what are the characteristic requirements of IoT? What is the current development stage of IoT, and what is the future direction? These are questions need further investigation. In this paper, we review the development history of Internet and summarize the lessons we learned from this development. Then we analyze the current status of IoT, and argue that most of the current IoT systems are “net of things”, i.e., small scale networks connecting physical physical objects. The future of IoT should be “Internet of Things”, i.e., inter-connected, large scale, and open network. With this judgment, we propose a novel IoT architecture, named WInternet, and disuse its design principals, network topology, connection scheme, protocol stack, as well the open issues in IoT and WInternet development.