Internet of Things From Hype to Reality: The Road to Digitization

by Ammar Rayes, Salam Samer

This book comprehensively describes an end-to-end Internet of Things (IoT) architecture that is comprised of devices, network, compute, storage, platform, applications along with management and security components. It is organized into five main parts, comprising of a total of 11 chapters. Part I presents a generic IoT reference model to establish a common vocabulary for IoT solutions. This includes a detailed description of the Internet protocol layers and the Things (sensors and actuators) as well as the key business drivers to realize the IoT vision. Part II focuses on the IoT requirements that impact networking protocols and provides a layer-by-layer walkthrough of the protocol stack with emphasis on industry progress and key gaps. Part III introduces the concept of Fog computing and describes the drivers for the technology, its constituent elements, and how it relates and differs from Cloud computing. Part IV discusses the IoT services platform, the cornerstone of the solution followed by the Security functions and requirements.  Finally, Part V provides a treatment of the topic of connected ecosystems in IoT along with practical applications. It then surveys the latest IoT standards and discusses the pivotal role of open source in IoT.

“Faculty will find well-crafted questions and answers at the end of each chapter, suitable for review and in classroom discussion topics.  In addition, the material in the book can be used by engineers and technical leaders looking to gain a deep technical understanding of IoT, as well as by managers and business leaders looking to gain a competitive edge and understand innovation opportunities for the future.”

Dr. Jim Spohrer, IBM

 “This text provides a very compelling study of the IoT space and achieves a very good balance between engineering/technology focus and business context.  As such, it is highly-recommended for anyone interested in this rapidly-expanding field and will have broad appeal to a wide cross-section of readers, i.e., including engineering professionals, business analysts, university students, and professors.”



Professor Nasir Ghani, University of South Florida

Genres: Technology

579 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 22, 2016

Reviews

[Siarhei · Rating 1 out of 5]

The only thing I've learned from this book is that: Cisco estimates that there will be 20-26 billion devices connected to the Internet by 2020. Authors repeat that phrase throughout the book! That is understandable, as the book is written by Cisco-affiliated men. And almost half of the book is about networks, not about sensors, actuators, control systems, monitoring, data analysis and all that interesting stuff you'd expect to hear about IoT. And by networks they mean mostly TCP/IP and Cisco routers, not BLE, ZigBee, Z-Wave and other interesting technologies (though they touch them slightly a few times). I know that it's incorrect to compare TCP/IP and wireless technologies as they belong to different OSI levels (and, yes, there is a section about OSI model in this book), but what I want to say is that I'd expect far more broad overview of different communication technologies and styles instead of concentrating on a single one.

Actually, there is one chapter about "things" (followed again by 2.5 chapters of networks and TCP/IP).

After the "networks half" of the book ends, the "sundries half" begins.

There is a superficial chapter about security (a joke about "S" letter in "IoT" goes here). And there is a chapter about IoT markets. And there is a chapter about blockchain (probably it's goal is to acquit the word "hype" in the title of the book). Was it really necessary to speak about blockchain and markets in a book about IoT? I think it's a waste of paper.

TLDR: I expected this book to be far more entertaining and informative.

P.S. Did I forget to mention Cisco in my review? Good, good, I didn't!

[Sean Fishlock · Rating 2 out of 5]

Textbook that is riddled with grammatical errors, typos, jargon and poorly cited examples. Quite embarrassing for a university level publication, given that a simple proofreading before publishing might have fixed most of these. The index is also unusable because more often than not it doesn't reference the correct pages and the few times I needed to use the glossary, the terms I was looking for weren't there. I guess there aren't too many books yet on the subject but I'd really recipe waiting for the next edition unless you're reading it as a text. The electronic version offered by Springer is cost prohibitive, there is no audio version and the teaching slides and problem questions weren't of great quality. you know it's not great when you find yourself seeking better explanations on Wikipedia.

This book was written by Cisco people so much of it leans toward a Cisco view of the concepts. would be better to see more vendor neutral perspective of the industry.

Overly technical in parts, not really suitable as an introductory text unless you have some existing knowledge of networking concepts. would probably have benefited from some input from outside the IT industry.

Seems to have potential as reference material just not a great personal experience. Fortunately I had a good lecturer who was able to adapt to the material to make it more palatable.

[Billal Teiba · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some parts of the book were really insightful whereas some were boring. The whole idea of this kind of these short books is not to delve into technical details. Trying to depict some aspects was unnecessary.
Definitely needs revision due to lack of good sentence structure and some typos.