Pioneering the Establishment of the Foundations of the Internet of Things

In the Internet of Things era, every one of over a trillion everyday items will include at least some ability to store and process information. And, more important, to share that information over the global Internet with the other trillion items. In order to support this technological evolution, among the first problems that were addressed by the research community was that of basic network communication as existing, conventional (Internet-like) networking approaches were either unworkable or impractical. One of the solutions proposed is the so-called “Support Approach” that was proposed in 2000 and rigorously studied using a combination of theoretical and practical research. In this paper we present the main findings and we comment on the research methodology that led to these results.