Setting Standards for the Internet of Things

Fifteen years ago, one of the first major initiatives in the Internet of Things took place. In 1999, the Auto-ID Center was formed at MIT; it later became the Auto-ID Labs, a global consortium of researchers and practitioners. The goal of both organizations was to research and help implement radio-frequency identification devices (better known by their acronym, RFID). That same year also marked the first recorded use of the Internet of Things (IoT) term by an Auto-ID co-director. (While the concept of connected things goes back at least two decades, to our knowledge it was Kevin Ashton, a co-founder of the MIT Auto-ID Center, who first used the appealing IoT term in 1999.) RFID was arguably the first major IoT technology of any scale. While not all RFID devices are connected to the Internet, from the beginning the technology involved a networked collection of sensors that monitored physical devices.