In a word: enormous. Priceonomics breaks it down: There are more than 50 billion IoT devices as of 2020, and those devices will generate 4.4 zettabytes of data this year. (A zettabyte is a trillion gigabytes.) By comparison, in 2013 IoT devices generated a mere 100 billion gigabytes. The amount of money to be made in the IoT market is similarly staggering; estimates on the value of the market in 2025 range from $1.6 trillion to $14.4 trillion.
History of IoT
A world of omnipresent connected devices and sensors is one of the oldest tropes of science fiction. IoT lore has dubbed a vending machine at Carnegie Mellon that was connected to APRANET in 1970 as the first Internet of Things device, and many technologies have been touted as enabling “smart” IoT-style characteristics to give them a futuristic sheen. But the term Internet of Things was coined in 1999 by British technologist Kevin Ashton.[ FREE report! Learn how leading CIOs are maximizing the utility of data collected through multiple channels. Download now! ]
At first, the technology lagged behind the vision. Every internet-connected thing needed a processor and a means to communicate with other things, preferably wirelessly, and those factors imposed costs and power requirements that made widespread IoT rollouts impractical, at least until Moore’s Law caught up in the mid ’00s.
One important milestone was widespread adoption of RFID tags, cheap minimalist transponders that could be stuck on any object to connect it to the larger internet world. Omnipresent Wi-Fi and 4G made it possible to for designers to simply assume wireless connectivity anywhere. And the rollout of IPv6 means that connecting billions of gadgets to the internet won’t exhaust the store of IP addresses, which was a real concern. (Related story: Can IoT networking drive adoption of IPv6?)
How does the IoT work?
The basic elements of the IoT are devices that gather data. Broadly speaking, they are internet-connected devices, so they each have an IP address. They range in complexity from autonomous vehicles that haul products around factory floors to simple sensors that monitor the temperature in buildings. They also include personal devices like fitness trackers that monitor the number of steps individuals take each day. To make that data useful it needs to be collected, processed, filtered and analyzed, each of which can be handled in a variety of ways.ADVERTISEMENT
Collecting the data is done by transmitting it from the devices to a gathering point. Moving the data can be done wirelessly using a range of technologies or on wired networks. The data can be sent over the internet to a data center or a cloud that has storage and compute power or the transfer can be staged, with intermediary devices aggregating the data before sending it along.
Processing the data can take place in data centers or cloud, but sometimes that’s not an option. In the case of critical devices such as shutoffs in industrial settings, the delay of sending data from the device to a remote data center is too great. The round-trip time for sending data, processing it, analyzing it and returning instructions (close that valve before the pipes burst) can take too long. In such cases edge-computing can come into play, where a smart edge device can aggregate data, analyze it and fashion responses if necessary, all within relatively close physical distance, thereby reducing delay. Edge devices also have upstream connectivity for sending data to be further processed and stored.
Examples of IoT devices
Essentially, anything that’s capable of gathering some information about the physical world and sending it back home can participate in the IoT ecosystem. Smart home appliances, RFID tags, and industrial sensors are a few examples. These sensors can monitor a range of factors including temperature and pressure in industrial systems, status of critical parts in machinery, patient vital signs, and use of water and electricity, among many, many other possibilities.
Entire factory robots can be considered IoT devices, as can autonomous vehicles that move products around industrial settings and warehouses.ADVERTISEMENT
Other examples include fitness wearables and home security systems. There are also more generic devices, like the Raspberry Pi or Arduino, that let you build your own IoT end points. Even though you might think of your smartphone as a pocket-sized computer, it may well also be beaming data about your location and behavior to back-end services in very IoT-like ways.
Device management
In order to work together, all those devices need to be authenticated, provisioned, configured, and monitored, as well as patched and updated as necessary. Too often, all this happens within the context of a single vendor’s proprietary systems – or, it doesn’t happen at all, which is even more risky. But the industry is starting to transition to a standards-based device management model, which allows IoT devices to interoperate and will ensure that devices aren’t orphaned.
IoT communication standards and protocols
When IoT gadgets talk to other devices, they can use a wide variety of communications standards and protocols, many tailored to devices with limited processing capabilities or not much electrical power. Some of these you’ve definitely heard of — some devices use Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, for instance — but many more are specialized for the world of IoT. ZigBee, for instance, is a wireless protocol for low-power, short-distance communication, while message queuing telemetry transport (MQTT) is a publish/subscribe messaging protocol for devices connected by unreliable or delay-prone networks. (See Network World’s glossary of IoT standards and protocols.)
The increased speeds and bandwidth of the coming 5G standard for cellular networks will also benefit IoT, though that usage will lag behind ordinary cell phones.
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