Characteristics of Internet of Things | IoT Tutorials

YASH PAL,

Characteristics of IoT – The main key characteristics of the Internet of Things are connectivity, Intelligence, Dynamic nature, Security, sensing, Heterogeneity, and Enormous scale.

Characteristics of the Internet of Things

  1. Connectivity
  2. Intelligence
  3. Dynamic Nature
  4. Security
  5. Sensing
  6. Heterogeneity
  7. Enormous Scale
Characteristics of Iot
Characteristics of IoT

Connectivity

Connectivity enables the Internet of Things by bringing together everyday objects. Across IoT devices and hardware, sensors, electronics, connected hardware, and control systems, there needs to be a connection among the various IoT levels. It provides hardware accessibility and compatibility for things with this connectivity, and new market opportunities for the Internet of Things can be created by the networking of smart appliances.

Intelligence

IoT provides the combination of algorithms and computation, software and hardware that makes it smart. The feature of intelligence in the sensing capabilities of IoT devices and the intelligence gathered from big data analytics. Intelligence in IoT is only concerned with the interaction between devices, while user and device interaction is achieved by standard input methods and graphical user interfaces.

Dynamic Nature

The most important part of IoT is gathering data from its environment, which is achieved with the dynamic changes that take place around the devices. The state of these devices changes dynamically, such as being connected or disconnected. In addition to the context of devices including temperature, location, and speed, the number of devices also changes dynamically with a person, place, and time.

Security

IoT devices are vulnerable to security threats. There are high levels of transparency and privacy issues with IoT. For creating a security paradigm, it is important to secure the endpoints, networks, and data that are transferred across all of them.

Sensing

We can’t imagine IoT without sensors that will detect or measure any changes in the environment to generate data that can interact with the environment. The sensing information is the analogue input from the physical world, but it can provide a rich understanding of the complex world.

Heterogeneity

IoT devices are based on different hardware platforms and networks and can interact with other device platforms through different networks. IoT architecture must support direct network connectivity between heterogeneous networks. The requirement of heterogeneous networks in IoT is scalability, modularity, extensibility, and interoperability.

Enormous Scale

The number of devices that communicate with each other will be much larger than the number of devices connected to the current internet. The management of these devices and their interpretation for application purposes is more critical.

Gartner (2015) confirms the enormous scale of IoT in the estimated report, where it expressed that 5.5 million new things will get connected every day and 6.4 billion connected devices will be in use worldwide in 2016, which is up by 30% from 2015. The report also forecasts that the number of connected devices will reach 20.8 billion by 2020.

Benefits of IoT

The Internet of Things offers several benefits to organisations. Some benefits are industry-specific, and some are applicable across multiple industries. Some of the common benefits of IoT enable businesses to be:

  1. Monitor their overall business processes
  2. Improve the customer experience (CX)
  3. Save time and money
  4. Enhance employee productivity
  5. Integrate and adapt business models
  6. Make better business decisions
  7. Generate more revenue.
  8. IoT motivates companies to rethink the ways they approach their businesses and gives them the tools to improve their business strategies.

IoT is most generous in manufacturing, transportation, and utility organisations, making use of sensors and other IoT devices. However, it has also found use cases for organisations within the agriculture, infrastructure, and home automation industries, leading some organisations toward digital transformation. IoT can benefit farmers in agriculture by making their jobs easier.

Sensors can collect data on rainfall, humidity, temperature, and soil content, as well as other factors, that would help automate farming techniques. IoT touches every industry, including businesses within healthcare, finance, retail, and manufacturing.

IoT Standards and Frameworks

There are several emerging IoT standards, including the following

  1. IPV6 over Low-Power Wireless Personal Area Networks (6LOWPAN) is an open standard defined by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). The 6LOWPAN standard enables any low-power radio to communicate to the internet, including 804.15.4, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), and Z-Wave (for home automation).
  2. ZigBee is a low-power, low-data-rate wireless network used mainly in industrial settings. ZigBee is based on the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802.15.4 standard. The ZigBee Alliance created Dotdot, the universal language for IoT that enables smart objects to work securely on any network and understand each other.
  3. LiteOS is a Unix-like operating system (OS) for wireless sensor networks. LiteOS supports smartphones, wearables, intelligent manufacturing applications, smart homes, and the Internet of Vehicles (IoV). The OS also serves as a smart device development platform.
  4. OneM2M is a machine-to-machine service layer that can be embedded in software and hardware to connect devices. The global standardisation body, OneM2M, was created to develop reusable standards to enable ToT applications across different verticals to communicate.
  5. Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) is an open-source published standard for asynchronous messaging over wire. AMQP enables encrypted and interoperable messaging between organisations and applications. The protocol is used in client-server messaging and in IoT device management.
  6. Constrained Application Protocol (COAP) is a protocol designed by the IETF that specifies how low-power, compute-constrained devices can operate in the Internet of Things.
  7. Long Range Wide Area Network (LORAWAN) is a protocol for WANS designed to support huge networks, such as smart cities, with millions of low-power devices.

IoT frameworks are as follows

  1. Amazon Web Services (AWS) IoT is a cloud computing platform for IoT released by Amazon. This framework is designed to enable smart devices to easily connect and securely interact with the AWS cloud and other connected devices.
  2. Arm Mbed IoT is a platform to develop apps for IoT based on Arm microcontrollers. The goal of the Arm Mbed IoT platform is to provide a scalable, connected, and secure environment for IoT devices by integrating Mbed tools and services.
  3. Microsoft’s Azure IoT Suite is a platform that consists of a set of services that enable users to interact with and receive data from their IoT devices, as well as perform various operations over data, such as multidimensional analysis, transformation, and aggregation, and visualise those operations in a way that’s suitable for business.
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