Over the next decade most devices connected to the Internet will not be used by people in the
familiar way that personal computers tablets and smart phones are. Billions of interconnected
devices will be monitoring the environment transportation systems factories farms forests
utilities soil and weather conditions oceans and resources. Many of these sensors and
actuators will be networked into autonomous sets with much of the information being exchanged
machine-to-machine directly and without human involvement. Machine-to-machine communications
are typically terse. Most sensors and actuators will report or act upon small pieces of
information - 'chirps'. Burdening these devices with current network protocol stacks is
inefficient unnecessary and unduly increases their cost of ownership. This must change. The
architecture of the Internet of Things will entail a widely distributed topology incorporating
simpler chirp protocols towards at the edges of the network. Rethinking the Internet of Things
describes reasons why we must rethink current approaches to the Internet of Things. Appropriate
architectures that will coexist with existing networking protocols are described in detail. An
architecture comprised of integrator functions propagator nodes and end devices along with
their interactions is explored.
