Challenges to be addressed to realize Internet of Things solutions for smart environments

The Internet of Things (IoT) includes billions of smart ‘‘things’’ connected and able to provide sensing, actuating, and data processing capabilities in order to create value-added services for almost any application domain. Through the last decade, its definition, technologies and scope have been evolving together with the relevant reference application scenarios and challenges. As to the latter ones, this editorial gives an overview of those of major interest for the relevant research community, which can be grouped in three major research areas: challenges and solutions in Healthcare and in the Ambient Assistant Living (AAL) domains, where major contributions are aimed at developing effective approaches for the analysis of the collected data for a fast and reliable monitoring of patients and recommendation of appropriate treatments; innovative software architecture and middleware able to guarantee interoperability, scalability and high performance of deployed platforms; challenges and solutions for the security and authentication management in heterogeneous wireless environments.