What is Internet of Things (IoT)?

Internet of Things is a trending topic in this era. It is an interesting concept of transferring data over a network with the help of interrelated computing devices, mechanical and digital machines. These interrelated devices contain unique identifiers. The magic concept here is that transferred data does not require human-to-human or human-to-computer interaction.

Let us now learn the concept of IoT or Internet of Things. When we separate IoT, the “thing” referred here may be sensors, a person or animal with monitor implants or transponders, any objects that can be assigned with an Internet Protocol(IP) address and are effective in transferring data over a network. The IoT can be best explained where they are mainly used in industries, customer service business, and others.
Also read: Top 5 Automation Tools to Streamline Workflows for Busy IT Teams

Working of IoT

In a primary environment of IoT, it mainly consists of smart devices that are web-enabled with embedded systems like processors, sensors and communication hardware. These smart devices help in collecting, transferring and acting on data that are obtained from their environments.

The data or information that are collected via smart devices are now transmitted through IoT gateways or other edge devices where the data are sent to be either cloud analyzed or analyzed locally. These devices operate without human intervention. In some cases like setting the devices, giving instructions and access to the data people can interact with devices.

The process of connectivity, networking and communication protocols used by the web-enabled devices rely on specific IoT application applications.  To make the information collecting processes easier and dynamic, the IoT makes use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning.

Importance of IoT

Smart work always beat hard! The Internet of Things aid people in working smarter with ease in the data transferring process. Other than the usage in smart homes IoT finds its application business field. When we deal with the business application it involves every step from how the system work, delivering insights that include the performance of machines, supply chain, and logistics operations. IoT is well-known for coast cutting and lowering labor costs in various companies with its automating process.

The other importance of IoT is improved service delivery, cost-effective manufacturing and delivery of goods, and provides transparent customer transactions.

In this fast rushing technological era, IoT has found its way of adaptation. It will always be a trend until the business work with the concept of connected devices in the race of business competition. Now let us see the importance of the internet of things in an organization.

Applications of IoT in industries sometimes are industry-specific and others are used across multiple industries. List of specific areas where IoT is used in industries are;

• To monitor all the business/company process.
• Cost and time effective
• Improves user experience
• Increases employee productivity
• Help in the integration and adaptation of business models
• Increases company revenue
• Improves business strategies

The Internet of things is mainly used the most in manufacturing, transportation and utility organizations.  They also find its application in the agriculture, infrastructure and home automation industries leading to digital transformation.

In agriculture field IoT aid in collecting and data transferring regarding rainfall, humidity, temperature, soil content and many other aspects that automate farming techniques.

IoT also helps in monitoring and manipulating mechanical and electronic systems in a building in home automation industries.

Now let us list out some of the advantages and disadvantages of IoT;

Advantages

• IoT helps in providing access to information from anywhere at any time on any device.
• Excellent communication between connected electronic devices.
• Saves money and time by transferring data packets over a connected network.
• Automating tasks help in improving the quality of business services.

Disadvantages

• Since the number of connected devices is more in number the information shared also increases this results in hacking and stealing of confidential information.
• Managing and collecting data become tedious when a massive amount of IoT is connected.
• Any bug in one system affects the working all the connected systems.
• Lack of international standard of compatibility for IoT makes communication tedious when connected with devices of different manufactures.

Standards and framework of IoT

Standards

1. IPv6 is an open standard that enables low power radio to communicate to the internet.
2. ZigBee is a wireless network with low power and low-data rate used in industrial settings. Dotdot which is created by ZigBee Alliance enables smart objects to work securely on any network.
3. LiteOS is an operating system mainly used for wireless sensor networks. This supports smart-phones, wearables, smart homes, and many other internets of Vehicles.
4. OneM2M is a machine-to-machine service layer used to connect devices. It can be embedded in software as well as hardware. This services layer was created to develop reusable standards to enable IoT applications across various verticals to communicate.
5. Data Distribution Services is an OMG (Object Management Group) developed an IoT standard used for real-time, scalable and high-performance machine-to-machine communication.
6. Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) is mainly designed to specify how low-powered and compute constrained devices can operate in the IoT.
7. Long Range WLAN is designed to monitor a huge network mainly used in smart cities with innumerable low-power devices.
8. Advanced Message Queuing Protocol is an open-source standard mainly used for asynchronous messaging by wire. This standard enables encrypted and interoperable messaging between organizations and applications.

Frameworks

1. Amazon Web Services is a cloud computing platform used for IoT. This framework is specifically designed to enable smart devices to connect and interact with the AWS cloud and various other connected devices.
2. Arm Mbed IoT is the best platform to develop apps for IoT based on Arm microcontrollers. This framework is mainly used to provide a scalable, connected and secure environment for IoT devices. This process is done by integrating Mbed tools and services.
3. Microsoft’s Azure IoT Suite is a platform that includes a set of services that enables the customer to interact with and receive data from their IoT devices. It also performs various operations over data which includes multidimensional analysis, transformation, and aggregation, and visualizes operation that is apt for the business.
4. Brillo/Weave of Google is a platform meant for speed implementation of IoT applications. This platform can be segregated into two main backbones Brillo which is an Andriod-based operating system used for the development of embedded low-power devices and the other is Weave which is an IoT oriented communication protocol used as the communication language between the cloud the device.
5. Calvin is an open-source platform designed by Ericson meant for building and managing distributed applications. It consists of a development framework for application developers and a run-time environment for handling the existing or working application.

Innovation can be well defined as the imagination of the future and filling the gaps. Internet of Things finds its application in every field. Some of the applications of IoT are wearables, smart cities, smart home applications, health care, agriculture, industrial automation, and others. IoT in industrial application monitors factory digitalization, product flow monitoring, inventory management, safety & security, quality control, packaging optimization, logistics, and supply chain optimization.

In Altorum Leren, we offer high quality industrial IoT platform to enterprises and aid in building custom IoT applications. We use standardized technologies like Ecllipse Hawkbit, MPLAB, PlatformIO, Ecllipse Ditto, and others