big trends
Connected
Things
Connecting
Europe
DOI: 10.1145/3312563
BY JULIE A. MCCANN, GIAN PIETRO PICCO,
ALEX GLUHAK, KARL HENRIK JOHANSSON,
MARTIN TÖRNGREN, AND LAILA GIDE
to exchange data, optimize processes,
monitor environments, and typically
consist of sensors, actuators, and low-
power compute infrastructures. CPS is
a term first coined in 2006 in the U.S. to
characterize “the integration of physical
systems and processes with networked
computing” for systems that “use com-
putations and communication deeply
embedded in and interacting with phys-
ical processes to add new capabilities
to physical systems.”
22 CPS is generally
put forward as the more systems notion,
while IoT emphasizes communication
and analytics, yet Io T-like devices need
not always use Internet protocols to
create a CPS, hence the ambiguity. The
European Commission debated for two
years whether to call its embedded in-
telligence programs CPS, with the latter
winning out in the end. In this article, we
embrace these terms fluidly and name
them Io T/CPS; for other definitions, see
the sidebar “Some Definitions.”
In essence, the terms represent
different perspectives on the techno-
logical advancements that have led to
creation of many related application
terms—industry 4.0, smart cities, preci-
IT IS ESTIMATED that personal computers, datacenters,
and other technologies constitute less than 1% of all
microprocessor usage;
10 embedded systems represent
the remaining percentage and can be found in our
washing machines, microwaves, remote controls,
and PC peripherals (such as keyboards and mobile
phones), with modern cars containing many tens of
embedded microcontrollers.
18 Modern embedded-system microcontroller and transceiver technology
advancements have brought forth the kinds of systems
we have in the past defined as pervasive, ubiquitous,
and embedded computing, and for some time in
Europe, “embedded intelligence.” However, today they
are better known as the Internet of Things (Io T) and
cyber-physical systems (CPS); see the figure here.
The jury is still out regarding a definition of the
latter two terms or indeed how to differentiate them,
but people generally tend to refer to Io T as
embedded devices that connect to the Internet
