Wireless Sensor Networking in the Internet of Things and Cloud Computing Era

In the recent past we have observed many technological revolutions, including the transition from the analog world into its digital counterpart and from centralized wired solutions to distributed and pervasive wireless systems. In particular, the advent of low- cost and low-power transceivers, together with the development of compact-size and open standard stacks, have made possible Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), largely adopted for both home/office and industrial monitoring applications. The nowadays ambitious goal is to sample, collect and analyze every piece of information around us, in order to improve production efficiency and ensure optimal resource consumption. The “Internet of Things” (IoT), i.e. the capability of connecting every possible device to the World Wide Web, is the practical answer to this request. The very large amount of information that is consequently generated could be profitably handled using “cloud” services, i.e. flexible and powerful hardware/software frameworks capable to deliver computing as a service. The aim of this work is to resume pros and cons of well-accepted WSN technologies, suggesting their possible extension towards already available cloud services.