IoT basics, possible projects?

Hello,

I'm sorry for asking such a generic question but I have been reading up about this for the past week or so and haven't really gotten anywhere. I'm an embedded developer working with ARM and AVR devices for the past 2-3 years. So I am quite comfortable working with embedded systems.

Recently I have been reading up on a lot of IoT stuff and have managed to cover the following :

     Some of the IoT protocols (CoAP,MQTT,DTLS/UDP,REST)

     Some IoT platforms and libraries (Erbium CoAP library, Contiki OS)

     Cloud Services

I haven't read all of these in detail but I now have a general idea of how they work and where they fit in.

However I am still not able to get a proper picture of how an IoT system would compare with a traditional system, and what would be the different design principles while setting about designing such a system. If any of you could point me towards some articles or other material which would help me get a better direction I would be very grateful.

Also,I have seen in the past that the best way to learn these things is to do. So could any of you suggest some simple projects I could work on so that I would get a better idea of the IoT infrastructure?  (P.S. I am new to web development and web services but would love to be able to code for all the layers as I always like learning new things)

Thanks

Nishad