Fundamentals of Internet of Things IoT

 

Fundamentals of Internet of Things IoT

Today the Internet has become ubiquitous, has touched almost every corner of the globe, and is affecting human life in unimaginable ways. We are now entering an era of even more pervasive connectivity where a very wide variety of appliances will be connected to the web. 

One year after the past edition of the Clusterbook 2012 it can be clearly stated that the Internet of Things (IoT) has reached many different players and gained further recognition. Out of the potential Internet of Things application areas, Smart Cities (and regions), Smart Cars and mobility, Smart Homes and assisted living, Smart Industries, Public Safety, Energy & environmental protection, Agriculture, and Tourism as part of a future IoT Ecosystem have acquired high attention. IoT Ecosystem. 

We are entering an era of the “Internet of Things” (abbreviated as IoT). There are 2 definitions: The first one is defined by Vermesan and the second by Pe˜na-Lopez 

1. The Internet of Things is simply an interaction between the physical and digital worlds. The digital world interacts with the physical world using a plethora of sensors and actuators.

2. Another is the Internet of Things is defined as a paradigm in which computing and networking capabilities are embedded in any kind of conceivable object.

We use these capabilities to query the state of the object and to change its state if possible. In common parlance, the Internet of Things refers to a new kind of world where almost all the devices and appliances that we use are connected to a network. 

We can use them collaboratively to achieve complex tasks that require a high degree of intelligence. For this intelligence and interconnection, IoT devices are equipped with embedded sensors, actuators, processors, and transceivers.

IoT is not a single technology; rather it is an agglomeration of various technologies that work together in tandem. Sensors and actuators are devices, which help in interacting with the physical environment.

The data collected by the sensors have to be stored and processed intelligently in order to derive useful inferences from it. 

Note that we broadly define the term sensor; a mobile phone or even a microwave oven can count as a sensor as long as it provides inputs about its current state (internal state + environment). 

An actuator is a device that is used to effect a change in the environment such as the temperature controller of an air conditioner. 

The storage and processing of data can be done on the edge of the network itself or on a remote server. If any preprocessing of data is possible, then it is typically done at either the sensor or some other proximate device.

The processed data is then typically sent to a remote server. 

The storage and processing capabilities of an IoT object are also restricted by the resources available, which are often very constrained due to limitations of size, energy, power, and computational capability. 

As a result, the main research challenge is to ensure that we get the right kind of data at the desired level of accuracy. Along with the challenges of data collection, and handling, there are challenges in communication as well. 

The communication between IoT devices is mainly wireless because they are generally installed at geographically dispersed locations. Wireless channels often have high rates of distortion and are unreliable.

In this scenario reliably communicating data without too many retransmissions is an important problem and thus communication technologies are integral to the study of IoT devices.

We can directly modify the physical world through actuators or we may do something virtually. For example, we can send some information to other smart things. The process of effecting a change in the physical world is often dependent on its state at that point in time. This is called context awareness. Each action is taken keeping in consideration the context because an application can behave differently in different contexts. 

For example, a person may not like messages from his office to interrupt him when he is on vacation. Sensors, actuators, compute servers, and the communication network forms the core infrastructure of an IoT framework. However, there are many software aspects that need to be considered. 

First, we need a middleware that can be used to connect and manage all of these heterogeneous components. We need a lot of standardization to connect many different devices. 

The Internet of Things finds various applications in health care, fitness, education, entertainment, social life, energy conservation, environmental monitoring, home automation, and transport systems.