Trends and characteristics
Intelligence
Ambient intelligence and autonomous control are not part of the original concept of the Internet of Things. Ambient intelligence and autonomous control do not necessarily require Internet structures, either. However, there is a shift in research to integrate the concepts of the Internet of Things and autonomous control, with initial outcomes towards this direction considering objects as the driving force for autonomous IoT.
In the future the Internet of Things may be a non-deterministic and open network in which auto-organized or intelligent entities (Web services, SOA components), virtual objects (avatars) will be interoperable and able to act independently (pursuing their own objectives or shared ones) depending on the context, circumstances or environments. Autonomous behavior through the collection and reasoning of context information as well as the objects ability to detect changes in the environment, faults affecting sensors and introduce suitable mitigation measures constitute a major research trend,[101] clearly needed to provide credibility to the IoT technology. Modern IoT products and solutions in the marketplace use a variety of different technologies to support such context-aware automation but more sophisticated forms of intelligence are requested to permit sensor units to be deployed in real environments.
Architecture
The system will likely be an example of event-driven architecture,[102] bottom-up made (based on the context of processes and operations, in real-time) and will consider any subsidiary level. Therefore, model driven and functional approaches will coexist with new ones able to treat exceptions and unusual evolution of processes (Multi-agent systems, B-ADSc, etc.).
In an Internet of Things, the meaning of an event will not necessarily be based on a deterministic or syntactic model but would instead be based on the context of the event itself: this will also be a semantic web.[103] Consequently, it will not necessarily need common standards that would not be able to address every context or use: some actors (services, components, avatars) will accordingly be self-referenced and, if ever needed, adaptive to existing common standards (predicting everything would be no more than defining a "global finality" for everything that is just not possible with any of the current top-down approaches and standardizations). Some researchers argue that sensor networks are the most essential components of the Internet of Things.[104]
Building on top of the Internet of Things, the Web of Things is an architecture for the application layer of the Internet of Things looking at the convergence of data from IoT devices into Web applications to create innovative use-cases. In order to program and control the flow of information in the Internet of Things, a predicted architectural direction is being called BPM Everywhere which is a blending of traditional process management with process mining and special capabilities to automate the control of large numbers of coordinated devices.
Network architecture
Internet of Things requires huge scalability in the network space to handle the surge of devices. IETF 6LoWPAN would be used to connect devices to IP networks.With billions of devices[38] being added to the internet space, IPv6 will play a major role in handling the network layer scalability. IETF's Constrained Application Protocol, MQTT and ZeroMQwould provide lightweight data transport.
Fog computing is a viable alternative to prevent such large burst of data flow through Internet. The edge devices' computation power can be used to analyse and process data, thus providing easy real time scalability.
Complex system
In semi-open or closed loops (i.e. value chains, whenever a global finality can be settled) it will therefore be considered and studied as a Complex system[106] due to the huge number of different links and interactions between autonomous actors, and its capacity to integrate new actors. At the overall stage (full open loop) it will likely be seen as achaotic environment (since systems have always finality).
Size considerations
The Internet of objects would encode 50 to 100 trillion objects, and be able to follow the movement of those objects. Human beings in surveyed urban environments are each surrounded by 1000 to 5000 trackable objects.[107]
Space considerations
In an Internet of Things, the precise geographic location of a thing—and also the precise geographic dimensions of a thing—will be critical.[108] Therefore, facts about a thing, such as its location in time and space, have been less critical to track because the person processing the information can decide whether or not that information was important to the action being taken, and if so, add the missing information (or decide to not take the action). (Note that some things in the Internet of Things will be sensors, and sensor location is usually important).[109] The GeoWeb and Digital Earth are promising applications that become possible when things can become organized and connected by location. However, challenges that remain include the constraints of variable spatial scales, the need to handle massive amounts of data, and an indexing for fast search and neighbor operations. If in the Internet of Things, things are able to take actions on their own initiative, this human-centric mediation role is eliminated, and the time-space context that we as humans take for granted must be given a central role in this information ecosystem. Just as standards play a key role in the Internet and the Web, geospatial standards will play a key role in the Internet of Things.[citation needed]
Sectors
There are three core sectors of the IoT: enterprise, home, and government, with the Enterprise Internet of Things (EIoT) being the largest of the three. By 2019, the EIoT sector is estimated to account for nearly 40% or 9.1 billion devices.[110]
A "basket of remotes"
According to the CEO of Cisco, the commercial opportunity for "connected products ranging from cars to household goods" is expected to be a $USD 19 trillion.[111] Many IoT devices have a potential to take a piece of this market. Jean-Louis Gassée (Apple initial alumni team, and BeOS co-founder) has addressed this topic in an article on Monday Note,[112] where he predicts that the most likely problem will be what he calls the "basket of remotes" problem, where we'll have hundreds of applications to interface with hundreds of devices that don't share protocols for speaking with one another.
There are multiple approaches to solve this problem, one of them called the "predictive interaction",[113] where cloud or fog based decision makers [clarification needed] will predict the user's next action and trigger some reaction.
For user interaction, new technology leaders are joining forces to create standards for communication between devices. While AllJoyn alliance is composed the top 20 World technology leaders, there are also big companies that promote their own protocol like CCF from Intel.
This problem is also a competitive advantage for some very technical startup companies with fast capabilities.
- AT&T Digital Life provides one solution for the "basket of remotes" problem. This product features home-automation and digital-life experiences. It provides a mobile application to control their closed ecosystem of branded devices;
- Nuve has developed a new technology based on sensors, a cloud-based platform and a mobile application that allows the asset management industry to better protect, control and monitor their property.[114]
Manufacturers are becoming more conscious of this problem, and many companies have begun releasing their devices with open APIs. Many of these APIs are used by smaller companies looking to take advantage of quick integration.[citation needed]
Sub systems
Not all elements in an Internet of Things will necessarily run in a global space. Domotics running inside a Smart House, for example, might only run and be available via a local network.
Frameworks
Internet of Things frameworks might help support the interaction between "things" and allow for more-complex structures like Distributed computing and the development ofDistributed 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.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.[138] XMPP provides a set of needed building blocks and a proven distributed solution that can scale with high security levels. The extensions are published at XMPP/extensions
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.[139]
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.
- RFID and near-field communication – In the 2000s, RFID was the dominant technology. Later, NFC became dominant (NFC). NFC have become common in smartphonesduring the early 2010s, with uses such as reading NFC tags or for access to public transportation.[citation needed]
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 ofIPv6 called 6LowPAN.
- ZigBee – This communication technology is based on the IEEE 802.15.4 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.
- Z-Wave – is a communication protocol that is mostly used in smart home applications.
- 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.
- 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.
Simulation
IOT modeling and simulation (and emulation) is typically carried out at the design stage before deployment of the network. Network simulators like OPNET, NetSim and NS2 can be used to simulate IOT networks.
Politics and civic engagement
Some scholars and activists argue that the IoT can be used to create new models of civic engagement if device networks can be open to user control and inter-operable platforms. Philip N. Howard, a professor and author, writes that political life in both democracies and authoritarian regimes will be shaped by the way the IoT will be used for civic engagement. For that to happen, he argues that any connected device should be able to divulge a list of the "ultimate beneficiaries" of its sensor data, and that individual citizens should be able to add new organizations to the beneficiary list. In addition, he argues that civil society groups need to start developing their IoT strategy for making use of data and engaging with the public.[142]
Criticism and controversies
While many technologists tout the Internet of Things as a step towards a better world, scholars and social observers have doubts about the promises of the ubiquitous computingrevolution.
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