Internet of Things (IoT) describes a system where items in the physical world, and sensors within or attached to these items, are connected to the Internet via wireless and wired Internet connections. These sensors can use various types of local area connections such as RFID, NFC, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Zigbee.
Sensors can also have wide area connectivity such as GSM, GPRS, 3G, and LTE. The Internet of Things will:
• Connect both inanimate and living things. Early trials and deployments of Internet of Things networks began with connecting industrial equipment. Today, the vision of IoT has expanded to connect everything from industrial equipment to everyday objects.
The types of items range from gas turbines to automobiles to utility meters. It can also include living organisms such as plants, farm animals and people.
For example, the Cow Tracking Project in Essex uses data collected from radio positioning tags to monitor cows for illness and track behavior in the herd. Wearable computing and digital health devices, such as Nike+ Fuel band and Fitbit, are examples of how people are connecting in the Internet of Things landscape.
Cisco has expanded the definition of IoT to the Internet of Everything (IoE), which includes people, places, objects and things. Basically anything you can attach a sensor and connectivity to can participate in the new connected ecosystems.
• Use sensors for data collection. The physical objects that are being connected will possess one or more sensors. Each sensor will monitor a specific condition such as location, vibration, motion and temperature.
In IoT, these sensors will connect to each other and to systems that can understand or present information from the sensor’s data feeds. These sensors will provide new information to a company’s systems and to people.
• Change what types of item communicate over an IP Network. In the past, people communicated with people and with machines. Imagine if all of your equipment had the ability to communicate. What would it tell you? IoT-enabled objects will share information about their condition and the surrounding environment with people, software systems and other machines.
This information can be shared in realtime or collected and shared at defined intervals. Going forward, everything will have a digital identity and connectivity, which means you can identify, track and communicate with objects.
IoT data differs from traditional computing. The data can be small in size and frequent in transmission. The number of devices, or nodes, that are connecting to the network are also greater in IoT than in traditional PC computing.
Machine-to-Machine communications and intelligence drawn from the devices and the network will allow businesses to automate certain basic tasks without depending on central or cloud based applications and services.
These attributes present opportunities to collect a wide range of data but also provide challenges in terms of designing the appropriate data networking and security.
