Summing up IoT

IoT looks to be coming up like a burst (everything connected and talking to each other through plethora of devices). So let’s take a plunge to see what it really means.

What is it?

IoT, the acronym itself says it all, Internet of Things . 

The Internet of Things (IoT) is the network of physical objects—devices, vehicles, buildings and other items—embedded with electronics, software, sensors, and network connectivity that enables these objects to collect and exchange data.

 IoT has been THE  buzz word these days, and a lot of companies are working on IoT devices and it is expected that a huge market still remains to be tapped.

As per market reports 4 billion connected things will be in use in the consumer sector in 2016,and will reach 13.5 billion in 2020. Every other vendor is busy sizing up the opportunity and trying to grab a chunk (greedy algorithm)

Okkk….Big Deal !!

Soooo…..I too have a device, which can be connected to the Internet and accessed remotely. My application and the device exchange data.

Why are you making so much noise? What’s so wonderful about it?

Didn’t we had Internet connected devices earlier…..I’m confused…or is it THE DARK FORCES are taking over the logical reasoning of humans.

Ok stop….under the divine light of wiki, google and the Internet, bestowed upon me, I have got the answer (at least seems so, until it is challenged).

Let’s assume that you are sitting in your office chair, waiting for the hectic day to end (hmmm….lightly loaded). All of a sudden you feel the urge to ensure that your roommate is not relishing the items that you have stocked for yourself. You pulled out your iPhone6 and logged into the remote camera app; took a 360 degree view of your home, then remotely set your refrigerator to “super cool” mode(for that chilled experience) and then….tik tok…tik tok…tik tok.

Now let’s put you in a bigger chair(dream big)…..one fine day you summon your  factory management and propose the idea of automating the factory to reduce the down time. What do you have at hand…..a big pile of dumb machines that need to be fed with intelligence of “reporting”.

So how do you go about it….Voila…let’s put some sensors onto the dumb machines (oh…what a shining GEM I am).

And then????…someone asked.

Hmmm…then we will get some IT people to connect our “things”(sensors) to the Internet so as to monitor the machines in real time.

Both the scenarios have more or less the same solution to the problem at hand (ignoring the bigger problem of office day not getting over)….connectivity.

Once your “things” are connected, you can always use the data from them in your own beneficial way. In the first case, it was some SMART new generation devices, that might be having the IP capability, and are easily connected to the Internet, whereas in the second scenario we have mundane devices that need to be connected, and in the most likely manner, the data from the devices will be used in a meaningful way.

In essence IoT brings together process, data, and things to make networked connections more relevant. In an IoT system, data is generated by multiple kinds of devices, processed in different ways, transmitted to different locations, and acted upon by applications.

To sum it up, IoT encompasses a much larger area comprising of devices that are already connected to Internet and also devices that are not connected.

Now here are some challenges for an IoT eco system:

• The end device “thing” might just not be IP enabled and hence we need ways to connect it to Internet
• The sheer breadth of the variety of devices that can be connected

The problems does not end at connectivity, it’s just the beginning.

Once connected you need to process the data from the “things”, which in itself can be overwhelming. Also since most of these devices are constrained in terms of memory, processing, power etc, we need to have special mechanisms for handling the issues.

Let’s take the example of factory automation.

Core Challenges:

• Connectivity
  • Since the devices involved are non IP capable, we need to have a way to connect with Internet. Possible solution is to connect the devices with sensors that are in turn connected to a gateway through WiFi, BLE or any other suitable interface. The gateway will act as the central point to connect to the Internet, through ethernet or cellular backhaul.

• Power requirements
  • Since the devices can (mostly) be battery powered, power consumption is one of the biggest challenges. Also in cases of directly powered, the devices should be able to handle power failures and thus should be able to operate on battery power for an extended time.

• Data processing
  • Since the data from sensor will arrive to the gateway, and will possibly be forwarded to a BUISNESS application (resident in cloud for eg), data mining becomes important. Consider hundreds of machine sending data at regular intervals. With such amount and frequency of data, it might not be viable (at least from business perspective), to forward all the data to  the application sitting in the cloud. Think of a case where the uplink connectivity is cellular. It will have significant cost impacts.

• Real time support
  • Sensitive data needs to be updated in real time

Just try to replace the factory machines with any other possible “thing”. Now could you see the impact….the plethora of machines, umpteen communication interfaces (WiFi, BLE, LoRA etc);the sheer amount of data flowing through the channels and many more.

Although it is not that the above challenges will be faced in every scenario, for example the devices may already have IP connectivity or there might be data churning already being done by the devices. But for sure this is not an exhaustive list and challenges will come, some way or the other, we don’t know.

In essence the IoT ecosystem is the idea of connecting a vast range of “things”(list is only constrained by our imagination) and reap the benefits through collective exchange of data.