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Currently, information and communication technology (ICT) is developing with the tendency of ubiquitous and smart. Internet is the most typical application of ICT, for it is an intermediary information platform, provided users with a fast and cost efficient way to share information, where it bridged geographic dispersed users and provided new business opportunities. Also, the Internet has benefited from new technologies over time and with each new technology opportunity arise, e.g., Web 2.0, allows users to actively participate in value co-creation through information sharing.
Similarly, cloud computing shifts the Internet to focus on services provisioning. According to the development history and current tendency of ICT, it can believe that these services can further leverage on a new radical conceptual as well as technological development shaping the emergence of Internet of Things (IoT). In IoT, each “thing” (object) can be uniquely identifiable and be linked up in an Internet like structure. IoT is a novel paradigm that is rapidly gaining ground in the scenario of modern ICT. And the basic idea of this concept is the pervasive presence around us of a variety of things or objects – such as Radio-Frequency IDentification (RFID) tags, sensors, actuators, mobile phones, etc. – which, through unique addressing schemes, are able to interact with each other and cooperate with their neighbors to reach common goals (Giusto, Lera, Morabito, & Atzori, 2010).
IoT related technologies make it possible to blurs the line between the digital and the physical world, which can bring opportunities to provide users with context-aware intelligence, based on real-time data, where the users concerned will automatically receive personalized information relevant to their surrounding environment.
The potential of the Internet has been expanded substantially by a new generation of mobile devices, opening the door for rapid growth of m-commerce. While the traditional PC access to the Internet continues to be vital for exploiting the advantages of the Internet, the mobile access appears to attract more people because of flexible accesses to the Internet in a ubiquitous manner (Ushio & Jun, 2010). IoT provides a more flexible way to access into Internet than mobile Internet, and IoT makes it possible to get context information as well as object status, it has the potential to support many exciting e-commerce manners.
IoT Service is still an insufficient explored concept and this paper will study IoT Service in depth and put forward the idea and architecture that enable IoT service. Meanwhile, based on IoT Service idea, the paper will study the novel application of e-commerce in background of IoT Service.
The paper is organized as follows: In the next section, we introduce related works done by others and discuss them briefly; the motivation of developing IoT service is described in the following section. After that, an IoT service architecture is proposed. Then, we choose e-commerce as an application scenario to show how IoT service works in reality. Finally in the last section, we provide conclusions for our research.