The Internet of Things (IoT) is a novel paradigm which is shaping the evolution of the future Internet. According to the vision underlying the IoT, the next step in increasing the ubiquity of the Internet, after connecting people anytime and everywhere, is to connect inanimate objects. By providing objects with embedded communication capabilities and a common addressing scheme, a highly distributed and ubiquitous network of seamlessly connected heterogeneous devices is formed, which can be fully integrated into the current Internet, thus allowing for the development of new advanced and intelligent services available anytime, anywhere, by anyone and anything. 
The implementation of the IoT concept will eventually have a high impact on many aspects of the everyday life of people, since entirely new domains will be affected by this phenomenon. Furthermore, considering that a major goal of IoT is to provide cross-domain solutions, new business models and business opportunities arise. By the fact of becoming Internet­enabled, such domains are expected to get “smarter” than what their users are currently used to. In fact, smart homes and cities, intelligent transportation systems, e­health, industrial automation, and the smart grid, are a few examples of such application areas where the interest of industry and relevant stakeholders in applying the IoT concept is growing fast. This is also testified by the increasing attention around related standardization activities within IETF, which is developing a set of IPv6­based solutions for constrained objects (supported by the IPSO – IP for Smart Objects – industrial alliance), and ETSI, which is developing a general architecture for interoperable machine­to­machine communications. 
Several challenges must still be addressed by the research community and the industry in order for the future Internet to evolve according to the IoT paradigm. Just to mention a few important ones:

• Novel architectures and protocols are required which are able to support in an interoperable manner an increasing number of nodes using heterogeneous communication technologies through its addressing, routing, mobility and management mechanisms. Such novel solutions must be scalable by design so as to cope with the expected exponential growth of the number of connected devices in the next years.

• The role of wireless communications, which is inherently lossy, needs to be taken into account in order to afford the appropriate level of reliability. There is also the need to develop low­power consumption solutions, because many nodes will be battery powered and therefore they have severe power constraints. Even when some energy can be harvested from the environment, long lifetime is still a major requirement for realistic and sustainable deployments.

• There are fundamental concerns related to security, trust and privacy that need to be addressed. While it is generally agreed that many security concerns are general, there are many non­functional properties for IoT solutions, which might only be key for the adoption in some market segments. For instance, high availability and reliability is extremely important in healthcare applications where life­saving decisions must be taken, but not as much in an application for tracking vehicles for insurance billing purposes. Protecting the privacy of the user data from unauthorized third parties in such applications is also of outmost importance. The trade­off between the additional complexity of including non­functional guarantees with respect to their real benefit is yet to be investigated.

• In many domains of practical interest (e.g., surveillance, fleet management) there are already solutions, typically vertically and proprietary, in place, which have been set up with significant investments. An efficient roadmap allowing an incremental inclusion of new paradigms / protocols / algorithms into an existing ecosystem is yet to be defined.

As testified by the recent literature and ongoing research projects, the Internet of Things is a very timely topic, thus making the workshop of much interest at this time. Moreover, we believe that focusing on the intercommunication and service creation aspects, while keeping the scope sufficiently general, gives also the workshop an additional value and a more focused target, which is appropriate for a workshop event.