Internet of Things: On the Opportunities, Applications and Open Challenges in Saudi Arabia

Abstract

The role of the Internet has significantly changed due to the development in communication technologies. Nowadays, billions of people and physical devices are connected via Internet. In near future, storage and computational services will be more pervasive and distributed. Even in recent times, we can see that people, machines, objects, and platforms are connected with wireless or wired sensors. Considering such an internet setting with billions of connected devices, in this paper, we present a study on the background, state-of-the-art, growth, key players, applications, challenges, and future opportunities in the area of Internet of Things (IoT). The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s IoT and M2M (Machine to Machine) communication market is estimated to grow to $16.01 billion by 2019 from $4.88 billion in 2014[26]. We also discuss general aspects and issues of IoT and explore the implication of all these in a developing country’s setting taking the case of Saudi Arabia.