The proliferation of electronic smart devices, and the ability to gather the data they generate in conjunction with prompt processing and feedback, is already having great consequences in our daily lives. Applications in environmental monitoring, automated control, logistics, transportation, energy management, e-health, safety management, and so on are rapidly expanding and posing new challenges to the design and use of current and future networks and to the information infrastructure as much as to the way we are going to interact with these technologies. This book describes those challenges, presenting some prospective solutions and developments in the field.

The book covers a very wide range of topics, going from network design, to data processing, to energy efficiency, to security. It offers an overview of common problems in network design and current developments in finding technical solutions to those complications. It goes on to present some alternatives to efficient data delivery, network reliability, energy consumption efficiency, algorithms for data processing in distributed and parallel environments, security policies, and application prototyping.

I take issue with this text because it offers a great variety of topics relevant to the Internet of Things (IoT), having as a major setback the assumption that the reader will be an expert in each of those topics. Should the reader be an expert in networks, he will be perhaps challenged by the machine learning topic or the application design subjects. The text requires a sound mathematical background and some previous knowledge of the subjects of each chapter.

The overall structure of the book does not follow a logical structure. For example, reading the first chapter will not offer you any cues on the next chapter, whose subject is from a completely different area as its successor and predecessor.

Each chapter has its own vocabulary and terminology, which seldom relate to that of the other chapters. I would have liked to see an abbreviation list and a glossary for each chapter, as aids for the reader to recall the many technical and mathematical concepts and definitions mentioned.

As for the audience, my guess is that the authors intended it for experts with an interest in any of the various topics. The topics are too technical and too loosely associated with each other to serve as an introduction for novices in the field. Expert readers will probably benefit by focusing on their subject and leaving aside the other topics discussed in the book.