The Internet of Things

It is rightly said that "Necessity is the mother of invention”; I got the taste of it when I forgot the security key to my apartment and had to take stairs to my apartment on the 7th floor. After reaching my apartment I was thinking what if there is a technology by which we can link all the products (so that people like me don’t have to take stairs every other day) and how we can use it in the fintech. With a problem statement I started exploring for an answer and the answer came in form of “Internet of things” . EUREKA!!

 What is Internet of things or IoT?

Simply put, this is the concept of basically connecting any device with an on and off switch to the Internet (and/or to each other). This includes everything from cellphones, coffee makers, washing machines, headphones, lamps, wearable devices and almost anything else you can think of. This also applies to components of machines, for example a jet engine of an airplane or the drill of an oil rig. As I mentioned, if it has an on and off switch then chances are it can be a part of the IoT. The analyst firm Gartner says that by 2020 there will be over 26 billion connected devices… That’s a lot of connections (some even estimate this number to be much higher, over 100 billion). The IoT is a giant network of connected “things” (which also includes people). The relationship will be between people-people, people-things, and things-things.

How Does This Impact You?

The new rule for the future is going to be, “Anything that can be connected, will be connected.” But why on earth would you want so many connected devices talking to each other? There are many examples for what this might look like or what the potential value might be. Say for example you are on your way to a meeting; your car could have access to your calendar and already know the best route to take. If the traffic is heavy your car might send a text to the other party notifying them that you will be late. What if your alarm clock wakes up you at 6 a.m. and then notifies your coffee maker to start brewing coffee for you? What if your office equipment knew when it was running low on supplies and automatically re-ordered more? What if the wearable device you used in the workplace could tell you when and where you were most active and productive and shared that information with other devices that you used while working?

 Frameworks

Internet-of-things frameworks might help support the interaction between "things" and allow for more-complex structures like distributed computing and the development of distributed applications. Currently, some internet-of-things frameworks seem to focus on real time data logging solutions like Jasper Technologies, Inc. and Xively (formerly Cosm and before that Pachube): offering some basis to work with many "things" and have them interact. Future developments might lead to specific software-development environments to create the software to work with the hardware used in the internet of things. Companies are developing technology platforms to provide this type of functionality for the internet of things. Newer platforms are being developed, which add more intelligence. Foremost, IBM has announced cognitive IoT, which combines traditional IoT with machine intelligence and learning, contextual information, industry-specific models and even natural language processing. The XMPP standards foundation XSF is creating such a framework in a fully open standard that isn't tied to any company and not connected to any cloud services. This XMPP initiative is called Chatty Things. XMPP provides a set of needed building blocks and a proven distributed solution that can scale with high security levels.The independently developed MASH IoT Platform was presented at the 2013 IEEE IoT conference in Mountain View, CA. MASH's focus is asset management (assets=people/property/information, management=monitoring/control/configuration). Support is provided for design through deployment with an included IDE, Android client and runtime. Based on a component modeling approach MASH includes support for user defined things and is completely data-driven.

REST is a scalable architecture which allows for things to communicate over Hypertext Transfer Protocol and is easily adopted for IoT applications to provide communication from a thing to a central web server. MQTT is a publish-subscribe architecture on top of TCP/IP which allows for bi-directional communication between a thing and a MQTT broker.

Enabling technologies for the IOT

There are many technologies that enable IOT. A key foundation piece is the network used to communicate between nodes of an IOT installation, a role that several wireless and/or wired technologies may fulfill.

1. RFID and near-field communication – In the 2000s, RFID was the dominant technology. Later, NFC became dominant (NFC). NFC has become common in smartphones during the early 2010s, with uses such as reading NFC tags or for access to public transportation.

2. Rapid developments in the Optical technologies like Li-Fi, Cisco's 40 Gbit/s bidirectional optical technologies (BiDi) may aid the development of IoT.

3. Optical tags and quick response codes – This is used for low cost tagging. Phone cameras decode QR code using image-processing techniques. In reality QR advertisement campaigns gives less turnout as users need to have another application to read QR codes.

4. Bluetooth low energy – This is one of the latest tech. All newly releasing smartphones have BLE hardware in them. Tags based on BLE can signal their presence at a power budget that enables them to operate for up to one year on a lithium coin cell battery.

5. Low energy wireless IP networks – embedded radio in system-on-a-chip designs, lower power WiFi, sub-GHz radio in an ISM band, often using a compressed version of IPv6 called 6LowPAN and relying on dedicated routing protocols such as LOADng standardized by the ITU under the recommendation ITU-T G.9903 and RPL.

6. ZigBee – This communication technology is based on the IEEE 802.15.4 2.4 GHz-band radio protocol to implement physical and MAC layer for low-rate wireless Private Area Networks. Some of its main characteristics like low power consumption, low data rate, low cost, and high message throughput make it an interesting IoT enabler technology.

7. Z-Wave – is a communication protocol that is mostly used in smart home applications. It uses a radio protocol in the 900 MHz-band.

8. Thread – Like ZigBee, this IoT communication technology relies on the IEEE 802.15.4 2.4 GHz-band radio protocol. A key difference is that its networking protocol is IPv6-compatible.

9. LTE-Advanced – LTE-A is a high-speed communication specification for mobile networks. Compared to its original LTE, LTE-A has been improved to have extended coverage, higher throughput and lower latency. One important application of this technology is Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communications.

10. WiFi-Direct – It is essentially WiFi for peer-to-peer communication without needing to have an access point. This feature attracts IoT applications to be built on top of WiFi-Direct to get benefit from the speed of WiFi while they experience lower latency.

11. HomePlug – This networking standard can be used to enable IOT communication over a home or building's power lines

12. MoCA – This networking standard can be used to enable IOT communication over CATV-type coaxial cable

13. Ethernet – This general purpose networking standard can be used to enable IOT communication over twisted pair or fiber network links

 Source: Forbes & Wikipedia