Today, and increasingly in the future, physical objects from the mundane to the esoteric will be tied to the Internet. From thermostats, fire alarms, and TVs to automobiles and mass transit, society will be dependent upon this interconnectivity. While these devices are commonplace today, in the future almost all are candidates for having embedded software in them that will gather information, process it, and communicate the relevant information through the Internet to control elements of interest. This book sets out to explore how these cyber-physical systems (CPS) comprising cyber-physical objects (CPO) will develop, and discusses the opportunities, challenges, and solutions to these challenges. The discussion is in the context of the Internet of Things (IoT).

The book is a collection of eight chapters by a worldwide set of authors. While no obvious mention is made, the chapters resemble papers from a meeting or workshop. As such, there is no attempt to integrate the chapters beyond the 31-page introduction. After defining the scope of the subject, it covers the opportunities in transportation, fabrication, homes, and health. The challenges are enormous: the obvious--security, safety, and reliability--and the not so obvious--from timing, energy usage, social issues, and legal issues, to sensitivity, radiation, and the size of the data sets gathered. These challenges are in need of a solution. This topic is covered in the final 13 pages of the opening chapter. The authors point out the need for increased attention to the education problem in computer science programs.

The second chapter discusses the evolution of CPO in the urban environment as the smart city evolves. The need for smart city pilots is called for, as the existing examples are test beds or isolated activities such as traffic controls. The third chapter extends the discussion to mobility aspects and proposes a reconfigurable and adaptive time division multiple access (TDMA) protocol in combination with real-time data-based middleware to provide seamless access across cooperating elements. Several experiments confirm the approach. The third chapter describes a framework to simplify real-time distributed communications. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 discuss services and networking problems. A case study of how a smart office environment might be envisioned is given in chapter 7.

The final chapter goes into detail about how smart objects operate within the entire urban setting. Cooperation between smart objects yields a smart environment; a figure is presented showing smart object usage. Interactions among sensors, citizens, operators, and local and external government entities are given.

Overall, this collection is interesting and illuminating. A few final comments: since it’s a collection, the chapters stand alone; thus, there is no index. The chapters are readable. An observation: with the enormous number of papers in this field, one wishes someone would conduct a survey to ascertain how many have had an actual effect on the industry.