There is huge potential, and also recent urgent demand, for connecting the physical world and the cyber world. With the diversity of Internet data and services, with the pervasive reach of networked sensor devices into physical environments, and with smartphones and tablets in people’s hands, the physical world and the cyber world are connecting through this new technological frontier. There are many different names for this connection, including cooperating objects, connected objects, connected things, smart objects, Internet of Things (IoT), Internet of Everything (IoE), and cyber-physical systems (CPS). The term “cooperating objects” is defined in the book as “modular systems of autonomous, heterogeneous devices pursuing a common goal by cooperation in computations and in sensing and/or actuating with the environment.” In the preface, cooperating objects are said to share “common ground” with IoT, CPS, and so on. But at their core, these terminologies all belong to the same concept, where physical worlds and physical objects can be interconnected in order to be measured, controlled, and managed remotely, with or without human intervention. The key goal is to ease the process of our interaction with the physical world in various life scenarios, including home, office, and natural environments. The book effectively focuses on various aspects of cooperating objects, with descriptions of real application scenarios, while sharing the key results, experiences, and lessons learned from these application deployments.

The book is set up in the following way. Chapter 1 introduces the core concept of cooperating objects and its different aspects, including end-to-end interconnection; extension in flexibility; resource utilization; device/object description; semantics; plug-and-play; life cycle management; service discovery; security, trust, and privacy; and device management. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 focus on three types of cooperating objects applications: (1) real-world system deployment and management of cooperating objects, (2) mobility-based application scenarios of cooperating objects, and (3) healthcare applications of cooperating objects. Finally, chapter 5 summarizes the covered aspects and lessons learned from cooperating objects deployment experiences in real-world applications. This chapter also examines the market, as well as results from useful surveys. These are important to understand, as they will help predict the future development and scope of cooperating objects/IoT in various application domains.

After the introduction and definition of cooperating objects in chapter 1, chapter 2 describes real-world application and system development scenarios in the following areas: monitoring railway bridges, service-oriented architecture (SOA) in industry automation, bird tracking, public safety scenarios, and road tunnel monitoring and control. Monitoring of railway bridges is done via a structural health monitoring (SHM) system with Zolertia Z1 sensor nodes, a customized fast Fourier transform (FFT), and a standard deviation-based peak picking algorithm with memory and energy optimization. The described work on industry automation includes the idea of enabling the execution of complex services in the mediator system of a conveyor belt segment from simplex services with the help of SOA. The described work on bird tracking deals with monitoring birds’ flight activities with the UvA-BiTS sensor platform, architecture, and database. Public safety scenarios include smartphone-based sensing, multicast communication in mesh networks, and data management. Road tunnel monitoring involves the deployment of a TelosB mote-based wireless sensor network (WSN) in an operational tunnel on a high-traffic freeway, middleware development, and environment sensing with carbon monoxide (CO) detection.

Chapter 3 discusses the mobility aspects of cooperating objects applications. The described applications cover a variety of deployment scenarios, including an industrial autonomous production plant, air traffic management (ATM), ocean exploration, and civil security in a disaster scenario. The industrial autonomous production plant scenario discusses multi-vehicle robotic systems, conflict resolution in resource usage, architecture for multi-robot coordinated actions, and path planning algorithms. The ATM scenario deals with trajectory-based operations, trajectory management, integration of aircrafts (both manned and unmanned), and collaborative decision making (information collection and distribution, routing, and so on). The ocean exploration scenario considers underwater communication, adaptive sensing, control architectures, special hardware features, and delay-tolerant networks (DTNs). The civil security scenario examines cooperation between static objects (ground-based sensor networks) and mobile objects (unmanned vehicles), self-deployment capabilities, and disaster response situations.

In chapter 4, the authors present applications and services of cooperating objects in the healthcare domain. Some of the important properties critical for healthcare are discussed, including end-to-end reliability, self-calibration, self-checking, robustness, multi-sensor fusion, context awareness, and resource (such as energy) optimization. The chapter focuses on real application scenarios using the signal processing in node environment (SPINE) open-source framework for wireless body sensor networks (WBSNs). The authors discuss a number of application scenarios in detail, such as human physical activity recognition; quantification of real-time physical energy usage; emotional stress detection; physical rehabilitation with wearable, energy-aware fall detection; collaborative and distributed digital signal processing; and model predictive control (MPC).

Overall, the book is useful for those interested in cooperating objects/IoT applications in a variety of scenarios. The work covers many application and deployment case studies in a concise, understandable manner. However, it felt at times like the book tried to cover too many domains at once and under one umbrella (cooperating objects).

Also, as a side note, more literature is needed to represent the core common inner architecture of IoT/cooperating objects, and then to show how this architecture is reflected in different systems and applications. There is an urgent need for a simple, understandable description of the core abstractions of the IoT, so that its key notions become clear, understandable, and applicable to people from all backgrounds and interests.

These criticisms aside, I recommend this book for people in both industry and academia, to help them understand real system and deployment experiences from cooperating objects applications. This book may also help readers in this area choose hardware/sensor platforms, software architectures, software platforms, data management methods, and networking protocols.