Internet of Things (IoT): Unlocking Connectivity

Introduction to the Internet of Things (IoT)

Definition Of Internet Of Things (IoT)

The network of connected devices known as the Internet of Things, or IoT, connects to and exchanges data with other IoT devices as well as the cloud. IoT devices, which can include consumer goods and both digital and mechanical machinery, are often incorporated with technology such as sensors and software.

IoT is being used by businesses across a range of industries more and more to boost productivity, provide better customer service, make better decisions, and add value to their companies.

With the Internet of Things, data can be shared over a network without requiring communication between individuals or between computers and people.

Any natural or artificial object that can be given an IP address and be able to send data over a network is considered a thing in the Internet of Things. Examples of such objects include people with implanted heart monitors, farm animals with biochip transponders, cars with sensors that warn drivers when tire pressure is low, and any other combination of man-made and natural objects.

How do we implement IoT?

An Internet of Things ecosystem is made up of web-enabled smart devices that gather, transmit, and act upon data they receive from their surroundings via embedded systems, which include CPUs, sensors, and communication hardware.

IoT devices can share the sensor data they collect by connecting to an IoT gateway, which acts as a central hub where IoT devices may transfer data. The data can also be delivered to an edge device for local analysis before being shared. Local data analysis lowers the amount of data transferred to the cloud, resulting in less bandwidth being used.

These gadgets occasionally interact with other similar devices and exchange information, acting upon the information received. The devices do most of the work without human intervention, while people can interact with them to set them up, provide instructions, or retrieve data.

The particular Internet of Things applications that are implemented heavily influence the connectivity, networking, and communication protocols utilized with these web-enabled devices.

Furthermore, the IoT may make use of artificial intelligence and machine learning to help streamline and dynamicate data collection processes.

Why does IoT matter?

People can live and work smarter thanks to IoT. For example, people can improve their lifestyles by using IoT-embedded items like cars, smartwatches, and thermostats. For example, a person’s thermostat can be set to a specific temperature, their automobile can communicate with the garage to open the door when they arrive home, and their lighting can be changed to a softer tone and intensity.

In addition to offering smart home automation products, IoT is essential for business. It provides companies with an instantaneous window into the inner workings of their systems, providing insights into anything from supply chain and logistics operations to machine performance.

IoT enables machines to complete hard tasks without human aid. Companies can automate processes, save labor costs, get rid of waste, and enhance service delivery. IoT provides insight into customer transactions and lowers the cost of manufacturing and delivery of goods.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the most important technologies, which is growing as more businesses realize how linked devices may help them stay competitive.

Advantages IoT offers to businesses

IoT provides businesses with a number of advantages. While certain benefits are specific to a given business, others are applicable to other industries. Typical benefits for businesses include the following:

• Keeps an eye on all business operations.
• Enhances the experience for customers.
• Saves both cash and time.
• Increases worker productivity.
• Offers flexible and integrated business structures.
• Helps in making wiser business judgments.
• Produces extra revenue.

IoT provides businesses with the means to enhance their business strategies and challenges them to reconsider how they conduct business.

The manufacturing, transportation, and utility sectors are the main users of IoT since they use sensors and other IoT devices. But it also has applications for businesses in the infrastructure, home automation, and agriculture sectors, guiding some of them toward digital transformation.

Farmers can benefit from IoT in agriculture by having their work made easier. Sensors can collect data on temperature, humidity, rainfall, and soil composition, and IoT can help automate farming operations.

IoT can assist in keeping an eye on infrastructure-related processes. For example, sensors can monitor changes or occurrences in the structural integrity of buildings, bridges, and other infrastructure that may endanger public safety. Better incident response and management, reduced operational costs, and improved service quality are some advantages.

IoT can be used by a home automation company to control and monitor a building’s mechanical and electrical systems. Large-scale waste and energy reduction can be aided by smart city inhabitants.

IoT has an impact on every industry, including retail, manufacturing, healthcare, and finance.

Benefits and drawbacks of IoT

Among the benefits of IoT are the following:

• Permits information access on any device, at any time, and from any location.
• Enhances the exchange of information between linked electronic devices.
• Enables data packets to be sent across a network connection, which can save money and time.
• Collects a large amount of data from various devices, benefiting manufacturers as well as users.
• Uses edge analysis to reduce the amount of data that needs to be moved to the cloud.
• Through task automation, reduces the need for human interaction and raises the caliber of a company’s products.
• Makes it possible for patients to receive continuous and more efficient care.

Among IoT’s drawbacks are the following:

• Expands the attack surface proportional to the number of connected devices. A hacker’s chance of stealing sensitive data rises with the amount of information transmitted through devices.

• Increases the difficulty of managing devices as the number of IoT devices increases. Organizations may eventually manage a large number of IoT devices, and compiling and arranging the data from all those devices could be challenging.

• Possesses the ability to corrupt other linked devices in the event that a system bug occurs.

• Increases the number of device compatibility problems because there is no global IoT compatibility standard. This makes it difficult for gadgets created by different manufacturers to communicate with one another.

Internet of Things (IoT) frameworks and standards

The following notable organizations are among those that have contributed to the development of IoT standards:

• Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).
• Open Connectivity Foundation.
• Thread Group.
• International Electrotechnical Commission.
• Open Connectivity Foundation.
• Connectivity Standards Alliance.
• Industrial Internet Consortium.

Some IoT standards include the following:

• The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has created an open standard for IPv6 over Low-Power Wireless Personal Area Networks (6LoWPAN). This standard allows low-power radios like 804.15.4, Z-Wave for home automation, and Bluetooth Low Energy to connect to the internet. This standard is utilized in agriculture and industrial monitoring in addition to home automation.

• Zigbee is a low-power, low-data-rate wireless network primarily utilized in residential and business environments. IEEE 802.15.4 is the foundation of ZigBee.The ZigBee Alliance created Dotdot, the Internet of Things’ universal language, to enable smart objects to interact and function securely across any network.

• The Data Distribution Service (DDS) is an industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) standard designed by the Object Management Group for real-time, high-performance, scalable machine-to-machine (M2M) communication.

IoT standards often use specific protocols to make device connectivity easier. A chosen protocol controls the data transmission and reception from Internet of Things devices. Here are a few examples of IoT protocols:

• Constrained Application Protocol: The IETF created the CoAP protocol, which describes how low-power, compute-constrained devices can function in the Internet of Things.

• Advanced Message Queuing Protocol: An open-source published standard for asynchronous wire communications is called AMQP. AMQP allows for interoperable and encrypted communication between apps and organizations. The protocol is utilized in IoT device management and client-server messaging.

• Long-Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN): This wide area network (WAN) protocol is made to handle massive networks with millions of low-power devices, such as those seen in smart cities.

• MQ Telemetry Transport: Applications for control and remote monitoring employ the lightweight MQTT protocol. It works well with low-resource devices.

The following are examples of IoT frameworks:

• Amazon has created a cloud computing platform for IoT called Amazon Web Services (AWS) IoT. Smart devices may now securely connect to and communicate with the AWS cloud and other connected devices thanks to this framework.

• Arm microcontrollers are the foundation for IoT applications developed on the Arm Mbed IoT open-source platform. This IoT platform gives IoT devices a scalable, connected, and secure environment by integrating Mbed tools and services.

• With the help of a suite of services called Microsoft Azure IoT Suite, users can communicate with and receive data from their Internet of Things (IoT) devices, perform a variety of operations on that data, involving multidimensional analysis, transformation, and aggregation, and present the findings in a way that makes sense for commercial objectives.

• Ericsson’s open-source Calvin IoT platform is intended for creating and overseeing dispersed applications that facilitate device communication. Calvin includes an application development framework and a runtime environment for managing running applications.

Enterprise and consumer IoT applications

From manufacturing and industrial Internet of Things to consumer and commercial IoT, the Internet of Things has a wide range of real-world applications. Applications for IoT are found in many industries, including energy, communication, and automotive.

In the consumer sector, for example, laptops and smartphones can be used to remotely operate smart appliances and thermostats, as well as smart homes with networked lighting, heating, and gadgets.

In order to make users’ lives easier and more comfortable, wearable gadgets with sensors and software can gather and analyze user data and communicate that information to other technologies. Wearables are also employed in public safety, for instance, by measuring the vital signs of firefighters or construction workers at potentially fatal sites, or by optimizing routes for first responders in an emergency, so they can improve reaction times.

Medical personnel can examine generated data with IoT in healthcare to monitor patients more closely. Hospitals often use IoT technologies for tasks like medication and medical equipment inventory management.

Smart buildings can reduce energy use by using sensors to detect the number of people in a room. The temperature can be automatically adjusted. For example, sensors may detect that a conference room is full and activate the air conditioner, or they may sense that everyone has left the office and reduce the heat.

IoT-based smart farming systems in agriculture can help monitor the light, temperature, humidity, and soil moisture in agricultural fields by using networked sensors. Irrigation system automation is another benefit of IoT.

IoT sensors and deployments, such as smart meters and lighting, can help reduce traffic, save energy, monitor and handle environmental issues, and enhance sanitation in a smart city.

Internet of Things (IoT) privacy and security concerns

The Internet of Things (IoT) requires protection since it uses billions of data points and connects billions of devices to the Internet. The increased attack surface of the Internet of Things makes IoT security and privacy top issues.

One of the most well-known IoT attacks happened in 2016. Significant system outages occurred for an extended duration due to the Mirai botnet compromising Dyn, a domain name server provider. IoT devices with lax security were exploited by attackers to enter the network. This is one of the largest distributed denial-of-service attacks that has ever been seen, and Mirai is still being developed today.

Because of how interconnected IoT devices are, a hacker might exploit one flaw to alter and destroy all of the data. Hackers can access devices manufactured by manufacturers who don’t update their firmware often or at all. In addition, people who use linked devices are often asked for personal information, like names, ages, addresses, phone numbers, and even social media accounts—information that hackers might use to their advantage.

IoT poses a serious privacy risk in addition to being vulnerable to hackers. For instance, businesses that produce and market consumer IoT devices may utilize them to harvest and resell customer personal information.

History of IoT

The first reference to the Internet of Things was made by Kevin Ashton, co-founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Auto-ID Center, in a 1999 presentation to Procter & Gamble (P&G). To capitalize on the hot new internet trend, Ashton titled his 1999 presentation “Internet of Things” in an attempt to get P&G’s senior management to pay attention to radio frequency ID. Neil Gershenfeld, a professor at MIT, also released When Things Start to Think in 1999. Despite not using the exact term, the book painted a clear picture of the path that IoT was headed.

The Internet of Things is a combination of wireless technologies, microelectromechanical systems, microservices, and the Internet. The boundaries between information technology and operational technology were broken down in part by this convergence, making it possible to evaluate unstructured machine-generated data and find insights that will lead to improvements.

Ashton was the first to refer to the idea of connected devices as the Internet of Things, even though it was first introduced as embedded Internet and pervasive computing in the 1970s.

Microelectromechanical systems, microservices, the Internet, and wireless technologies have all come together to form the Internet of Things. The boundaries between information technology and operational technology were broken down in part by this convergence, making it possible to evaluate unstructured machine-generated data and find insights that will lead to improvements.

Although Ashton was the first who mention the Internet of Things, the concept of connected gadgets dates back to the 1970s when it was known as embedded Internet and pervasive computing.

For instance, a Coke machine at Carnegie Mellon University in the early 1980s was the first internet appliance. Whether programmers decide to visit the machine, they may utilize the internet to see how it’s doing and to see whether they will get a cold drink.

The Internet of Things emerged as a result of machine-to-machine (M2M) communication between machines connected via a network without human interaction. M2M refers to the process of gathering, managing, and linking a device to the cloud.

Advancing M2M, IoT a sensor network made up of billions of smart gadgets, connects people, computers, and other applications to gather and share data. The Internet of Things is made possible by the connectivity that M2M delivers.

Additionally, SCADA, a group of software application programs for process control—which involves real-time data collection from remote places to regulate machinery and conditions—is a natural extension of IoT. Both software and hardware are included in SCADA systems. Data is gathered and fed into a desktop computer running SCADA software by the equipment, where it is quickly processed and displayed. First-generation IoT systems evolved from late-generation SCADA systems.

The Internet of Things ecosystem, however, did not take off as a whole until 2010, the year the Chinese government declared that IoT would be given top priority in its five-year plan. In the years between 2010 and 2019, IoT changed due to rising consumer adoption. The use of internet-connected gadgets, such as smart TVs and smartphones, has increased. All of these gadgets belonged to the same network and could communicate with one another.

The quantity of IoT devices as well as cellular IoT, which in 2020 will support 2G, 3G, 4G, and 5G in addition to LoRaWAN, or long-term evolution for machines, or LTE-M, both kept growing. 

By 2023, billions of internet-connected gadgets will be gathering and exchanging data for business and consumer applications. IoT has been crucial in the development of digital twins, which are virtual representations of real-world items or processes. The physical connections between an entity and its twin are usually made by IoT sensors, and digital twins usually call for an appropriately set-up IoT installation.

Similarly, the Internet of Things is making wearables and in-home sensors that can remotely monitor a patient’s health more and more widespread in the healthcare sector.