tium of multinational telcos, including
Telefónica (Spain), Orange (formally
French Telecom), and others, to a suite
of more than 50 components to create
value from real-world applications enabled by the ubiquity of heterogeneous
and resource-constrained devices. Another example is from the ARTEMIS
Industry Association,
9 with more than
170 members and associates from all
over Europe, and the European IoT
Platform Initiative Programme (IoT
EPI), a € 50 million programme with
nine projects involving more than 40
different Io T platforms exploring multiple approaches to interoperability.
11
An example of where Europe leads
in living-lab deployments is the Smart-
Santander testbed in Santander, Spain,
a prominent European experimental
infrastructure for Io T/CPS. By embed-
ding a large number of diverse sensor
devices into a city environment, it al-
lowed a variety of smart city use cases
to be explored. While initially useful
for experiments with Io T protocols and
data-driven services, the infrastructure
is now part of the Santander’s day-to-
day operation, improving the lives of its
citizens. Since its beginnings in 2010,
more than 12,000 sensor devices have
been deployed across the city to help
the government operate as efficiently
as possible through such applications
as adaptive traffic management, smart
parking, water management, intelli-
gent streetlights, and waste disposal.
SmartSantander went on to inspire
other initiatives around the world, in-
tocols (such as ZigBee, designed in the
U.S.) overcome these short distances by
providing multi-hop communications,
allowing data to be relayed between
devices to form longer-distance routes
and hopping the data from device to
device. However, in Europe, for re-
searchers (such as Dunkels), the quest
was now to push the Internet Protocol
all the way down to small embedded
devices themselves.
2 Early attempts
include the work of Zach Shelby, an
American, working at Oulu Universi-
ty,
3 but the now-ubiquitous 6LowPAN
protocol has emerged to provide light-
weight end-to-end Internet connectiv-
ity down to the smallest devices and
has gradually replaced the previously
popular ZigBee communications ap-
proach.
While 6LowPAN allowed for more
efficient raw Internet communica-
tion, the next logical step was to make
it Web friendly by replacing its heavy
Web protocol with a more lightweight
one. Work emanating from European
large-scale mixed academic/industrial
projects (such as SENSEI and FP7) fo-
cused on how such emerging wireless
sensor and actuator networks can be
more effectively integrated into a fu-
ture Internet.
4 Shelby worked with the
Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)
and such companies as England’s ARM
low-power processor design company,
ultimately producing the COAP proto-
col5 used to make applications on low-
power devices easier to program. At
about the same time, Dom Guinard at
ETH Zurich and others advocated for
such devices to become first-class citi-
zens in the current Web. His pioneer-
ing work led to what is now known as
the Web of Things, with active work (as
part of W3C) receiving support from
Siemens, Google, and other sources.
6
The increasing investment in CPS/
Io T throughout Europe, and the world,
has meant an increase in the number
of systems, protocols, and applications being built. Also, there was little
integration between systems, as seen
especially in the smart-city domain.
This fragmentation is thought to have
undermined the confidence of stakeholders and market opportunities,
affecting IoT adoption, thus causing
Europe to become increasingly focused on the applications built on top
of Io T/CPS systems and their integration.
7 Indeed the perception in Europe
was that while U.S. Io T/CPS innovation
focused on adoption environments
based on individual business cases
driven by economic return on investment, Europe’s industry and academic
researchers focused on the exploration
of societal benefits and acceptance of
CPS/Io T technology generally.
One major success resulting from
the European joint research and industrial projects is FIWARE, a curated
framework of open source-platform,
market-ready components to accelerate development of IoT/CPS systems
and their integration with cloud services.
8 Since its beginnings in 2012,
FIWARE has evolved from a consor-
Timeline of some key Io T events.
