PERHAPS AS EARLY AS
THE END OF THIS DECADE, our refrigerators
will e-mail us grocery lists. Our doctors will update our prescriptions using
data beamed from tiny monitors attached to our bodies. And our alarm clocks
will tell our curtains when to open and our coffeemakers when to start the
morning brew.
By 2020, according
to forecasts from Cisco Systems, the global Internet will consist of 50 billion
connected tags, televisions, cars, kitchen appliances, surveillance cameras,
smartphones, utility meters, and whatnot. This is the Internet of Things, and
what an idyllic concept it is.
But here’s the
harsh reality: Without a radical overhaul to its underpinnings, such a massive,
variable network will likely create more problems than it proposes to solve.
The reason? Today’s Internet just isn’t equipped to manage the kind of traffic
that billions more nodes and diverse applications will surely bring.
