The internet of What? IoT… The new revolution.

Tell the truth …. how many of you could actually make it through a day without your smartphone?

In our world today, there are more smart devices than there are people. A growing number of people are connected to the Internet, in one way or another, 24 hours a day. An ever-increasing number of people have, and rely on, three, four, or more smart devices. These might include smartphones, exercise and health monitors, e-readers, tablets or TVs; by 2020, it is forecast that each consumer will have an average of 6.58 smart devices.

But how is it possible for so many devices to be connected?

Modern digital networks make all of this possible. The world is quickly being covered with networks that allow digital devices to interconnect and transmit. Think of the mesh of networks like a digital skin surrounding the planet.

With this digital skin, mobile devices, electronic sensors, electronic measuring devices, medical devices, and gauges are all able to connect. They monitor, communicate, evaluate, and in some cases automatically adjust to the data that is being collected and transmitted.

As society embraces these digital devices, as digital networks continue to grow around the world, and as the economic benefits of digitization continue to grow, we are seeing a digital transformation that it’s been applied to provide the stage for business and industry to innovate and it’s getting involved in every aspect of human life.

All of these it’s achieved thanks to something called the Internet of Things (IoT), but what exactly is that?

The Internet of Things, or IoT, refers to the billions and a growing number of physical devices around the world that aren’t traditional computing devices but are now connected to the internet to send data, receive instructions, or both.

These devices are embedded with internet connectivity, sensors, and other hardware that allow communication and control via the web.

There’s an incredibly broad range of things that fall under that umbrella, and the first thing that might come to our mind it’s Internet-connected “smart” versions of traditional appliances like refrigerators, light bulbs, or anything that can make our home smarter. But far from being restricted to just the home, the Internet of Things can be found in an array of devices, industries, and settings. From smart blackboards in school classrooms to medical devices that can detect signs of Parkinson’s disease, IoT is rapidly making the world smarter by connecting the physical and the digital.

Thanks to the arrival of super-cheap computer chips and the ubiquity of wireless networks, it’s possible to turn anything, from something as small as a pill to something as big as an airplane, into a part of the IoT. Connecting up all these different objects and adding sensors to them adds a level of digital intelligence to traditional devices, enabling them to communicate real-time data without involving a human being. And this an important point about IoT, that these devices do not require human-to-human or human-to-computer interaction at all in order to work.

So, when this all begun?

The idea of adding sensors and intelligence to basic objects was discussed throughout the 1980s and 1990s (a vending machine at Carnegie Mellon that was connected to ARPANET in 1970 can be the first Internet of Things device). But it was not until 1999 that the term ‘Internet of Things’ came out and it’s was introduced by the British technologist Kevin Ashton. Before that progress was slow simply because the technology wasn’t ready. Chips were too big and bulky and there was no way for objects to communicate effectively, it took at least another decade for the technology to catch up with the vision.

The first big step become with the adoption of RFID tags (in another word, cheap and minimalist transponders that could be stuck on any object to connect it to the internet), the second one was the increasing availability of broadband internet and cellular and wireless, and the third and a big one not only for IoT but for connectivity, in general, is the adoption of Ipv6, why is Ipv6 so important? Because of the average of 6.58 smart devices per person, to give you some context the IPv4 has 4,294,967,296 addresses (almost all of them used), but the new protocol IPv6 has 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 address, and that’s a lot way more.

By 2020 there are more than 50 billion IoT devices, and those devices generated around 4.4 zettabytes of data just in 2020 (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.

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.

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.

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, the 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.

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 endpoints.

What are the benefits of the Internet of Things for business?

The benefits of the IoT for business depend on the particular implementation; agility and efficiency are usually top considerations. The idea is that enterprises should have access to more data about their own products and their own internal systems, and a greater ability to make changes as a result.

Manufacturers are adding sensors to the components of their products so that they can transmit data back about how they are performing. This can help companies spot when a component is likely to fail and to swap it out before it causes damage. Companies can also use the data generated by these sensors to make their systems and their supply chains more efficient because they will have much more accurate data about what’s really going on.

The volume of data IoT devices can gather is far larger than any human can deal with in a useful way, and certainly not in real-time. We’ve already seen that edge computing devices are needed just to make sense of the raw data coming in from the IoT endpoints. There’s also the need to detect and deal with data that might be just plain wrong.

Many IoT providers are offering machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities to make sense of the collected data. analyzing data from drones to distinguish between trivial damage to a bridge and cracks that need attention, for instance.

For many IoT systems, there’s a lot of data coming in fast and furious, which has given rise to a new technology category, edge computing, consisting of appliances placed relatively close to IoT devices, fielding the flow of data from them. These machines process that data and send only relevant material back to a more centralized system for analysis. For instance, imagine a network of dozens of IoT security cameras. Instead of bombarding the building’s security operations center with simultaneous live-streams, edge-computing systems can analyze the incoming video and only alert the when one of the cameras detects movement.

But not everthing is charming around IoT devices, because there is some major problems that can be attached with them, mostly security problems.

The internet of things connects billions of devices to the internet and involves the use of billions of data points, all of which need to be secured. Due to its expanded attack surface, IoT security and IoT privacy are cited as major concerns.

In 2016, one of the most notorious recent IoT attacks was Mirai, a botnet that infiltrated domain name server provider Dyn and took down many websites for an extended period of time in one of the biggest distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks ever seen. Attackers gained access to the network by exploiting poorly secured IoT devices.

Because IoT devices are closely connected, all a hacker has to do is exploit one vulnerability to manipulate all the data, rendering it unusable. Manufacturers that don’t update their devices regularly — or at all — leave them vulnerable to cybercriminals.

Additionally, connected devices often ask users to input their personal information, including names, ages, addresses, phone numbers, and even social media accounts — information that’s invaluable to hackers.

Hackers aren’t the only threat to the internet of things; privacy is another major concern for IoT users. For instance, companies that make and distribute consumer IoT devices could use those devices to obtain and sell users’ personal data.

Beyond leaking personal data, IoT poses a risk to critical infrastructure, including electricity, transportation, and financial services.

Source:

Acharjya, D.P.; Geetha, M.K., eds. (2017). Internet of Things: Novel Advances and Envisioned Applications

Rowland, C.; Goodman, E.; Charlier, M.; et al., eds. (2015). Designing Connected Products: UX for the Consumer Internet of Things

Li, S.; Xu, L.D., eds. (2017). Securing the Internet of Things