The Internet of Things (IoT) envisages expanding the current Internet with a huge number of intelligent communicating devices. Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) integrating IoT will rely on a set of the open standards striving to offer scalability and reliability in a variety of operating scenarios and conditions. Standardized protocols will tackle some of the major WSN challenges like energy efficiency, intrinsic impairments of low-power wireless medium, and self-organization. After more then a decade of tremendous standardization efforts, we can finally witness an integral IP-based WSN standardized protocol stack for IoT. Nevertheless, the current state of standards has redundancy issues and can benefit from further improvements. We would like to highlight some of the cross-layer aspects that need to be considered to bring further improvements to the standardized WSN protocol stack for the IoT.

Between prophecies of revolutions and inertiae of legacies, the Internet of Things (IoT) has already become the brand under which light processing units communicate over complex networks. Network processing is caught between demands for computation, raised by the growing complexity of the networks, and limitations imposed by performance of lightweight devices on processing. In this contribution the potential for disruptive changes against the scaling of existing technologies is discussed, specifically three main aspects of the IoT that impact network protocols and their processing: the reversal of the client/server architectures, the scavenging of spectral bands, and the federation of Internet gateways.