The Internet of Things (IoT) is said to be an extension of the Internet into the physical world, in which physical entities (objects/devices/things) are interconnected [1]. There are already many more “things” than “people” and the integration of the Internet with the physical world will be a challenge for the future Internet technology [2]. This will be a challenge because the Internet has been operating with human intervention, and the integration of the physical world with the Internet requires a self-configuring network in which devices may have to take decisions and operate without human intervention. The challenges that will need to be addressed include dealing with the identification of devices, mobility of wireless devices, providing security and quality communication between devices. The IoT paradigm will make it possible for virtually any device (“thing”) around us to exchange information and work in synergy with each other in order to dramatically increase the quality of our lives [2]. Intelligent day-to-day devices will inter-operate and exchange information between each other seamlessly via the Internet. These devices have sensing capabilities and are able to initiate communication or request data to take decisions (human guided or non-human guided decisions). Communication could be device-to-device and device-to human and device simultaneously. There are several definitions for the IoT in general. Basically all the definitions share the fact that the main components of the IoT are the devices or objects, the wired/wireless networks and the Internet; and the information/knowledge (data) storage facility. Devices are the major building blocks of an IoT ecosystem [3]. They bridge the real world of physical entities with the digital world of the Internet. They have monitoring, sensing, actuation, computation, and processing capabilities. Devices can be classified as sensors, tags or actuators. Sensors provide information about the physical entity they monitor. The information from sensors can be stored for later retrieval. Tags are specialized sensors known as readers which enable identification processes. Actuators can modify the physical state of a physical entity. However, some actual devices are a combination of several of these types. For instance, a sensor node often contains both sensors (eg, movement sensing) as well as actuators (eg, room-light switch)[3]. The devices are visible and traceable (ie they can be monitored and tracked). In addition, the status and current location of the devices can be obtained because they are addressable and have unique identities within the IoT. They are able to interact with each other, access each other’s information, store, and retrieve data via the Internet in order to create information for different purposes.

The wired or wireless networks include the autonomous field networks and the wide area networks. The smart day to day devices in the IoT form part of the short range field networks that exist autonomously. These autonomous field networks are seamlessly interconnected together via any available long range wired or wireless access network which facilitates access to information available through the Internet. Examples of field networks are the Radio-Frequency IDentification (RFID) networks, where RFID tags, labels, and readers are the devices, wireless sensor networks with sensors and actuators as the devices, and vehicular networks with