System primitives allow formalisms, reasoning,
simulations, and reliability and security
risk-tradeoffs to be formulated and argued. In this
work, five core primitives belonging to most
distributed systems are presented. These primitives
apply well to systems with large amounts of data,
scalability concerns, heterogeneity concerns,
temporal concerns, and elements of unknown pedigree
with possible nefarious intent. These primitives
are the basic building blocks for a Network of
‘Things’ (NoT), including the Internet of Things (IoT).
This document offers an underlying and foundational
understanding of IoT based on the realization that
IoT involves sensing, computing, communication, and
actuation. The material presented here is generic to
all distributed systems that employ IoT technologies
(i.e., ‘things’ and networks). The expected audience
is computer scientists, IT managers, networking
specialists, and networking and cloud computing
software engineers. To our knowledge, the ideas and
the manner in which IoT is presented here is unique.
Keywords
Internet of Things (IoT); Network of Things (NoT);
reliability; security; trust; trustworthiness, sensors;
big data; composability; distributed system;