The Internet of Things

Vikas Mujumdar, March 5, 2020

We all know the Internet - often broadly referred to as the World Wide Web (WWW) although the two are closely related but yet very different - is a massive collection of connected computers. These computers, known broadly as web servers, serve up content (web pages) and process transactions. The content served up is read by and transactions are initiated by a human using a web browser on a personal computer or a mobile app on a smart phone (referred to as clients) which are also connected to this network. This network of servers and clients supports information (text) delivery, media (audio and video) delivery, communication (email, text chat, video conferencing, voice calls), e-commerce transactions (including shopping for all kinds of items, all kinds of travel related bookings and such) and complex banking and financial transactions. A point to be specifically noted is that all these transactions are largely human-machine interactions.

Now imagine this network includes other things around you that you did not consider computers. At home imagine this network included cars, air conditioning units, door locks, refrigerators, lights and ovens. At work in a factory imagine this network included machines, trucks, warehouses and video cameras. Imagine things like your clothes, watches and shoes were all connected to this network. And imagine all these things could communicate with each other, sending data or executing transactions, without any human intervention.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a connected network of physical objects that are not computers but contain embedded technology to sense and communicate or interact with their internal states or the external environment. IoT seamlessly links the physical and the digital worlds.

If it becomes all-pervasive the world will pretty much run itself. Of course, things will have to be programmed to do the things we humans want them to do, but after that, we will be required to do very little except maybe take some decisions that the things are not yet smart enough to take. This would have been a good segue to discussing Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning but we will keep that for later.

The Internet of Things is not a solution by itself. It only refers to a network where many more things, other than computers, are connected and communicate with each other. There are many other technology solutions, all of them stitched together in the right manner will give you solutions for the emerging applications we are visualizing.

First, assume all things have a sensor and capture data. Generally, the things or the sensors will not have much computing power or storage capacity, if any at all, which means the data they capture needs to be transmitted over a network to storage and computing devices. Unlike computers, most things are likely to be mobile or away from a fixed line network. For this, they need to be able to access a high bandwidth and high speed wireless (most often cellular, 4G and soon 5G) data network. This becomes an important component of the solution.

All of these things will capture huge amounts of data. The data may not be simply text and numbers, it could be video and audio feeds or bio-metric data. If stored and analyzed correctly, this data could provide businesses extremely valuable insights on their customers, products and services that will enable them to improve product or service quality and fine tune their marketing and sales strategies to match rapidly evolving customer expectations. Thus data storage, processing and analysis solutions are the next set of technology components that will contribute towards an IoT solution.

If human intervention is to be reduced, there will need to be systems that can be programmed to process the data contextually and take a decision and possibly initiate an action. Not all solutions will need complex artificial intelligence and machine learning solutions, many will be simpler IFTTT (If This Then That) solutions.

Finally, to make it a self-controlling system, feedback in the form of an action to be taken - decided based on analysis of the data received - will have to be given to controllers, which in turn will transmit the feedback in the form of control signals to the thing that needs to take action or change it state (such as switch on or off an appliance).

If you break the Internet of Things (IoT) down to its constituents, what we have is illustrated in the sketch below:

- A thing capable of reading environmental parameters and the real world information around it, just as a human would. This is the data acquisition layer and could be one or more of the many types of sensors or a camera.

- A pre-processor, we will call it a gateway, which would help manage the things, secure the data received, format it or add some information if required and forward it to the processor.

- A processor, which would store, analyze and process the data and take a decision on an action or an outcome.

- A controller, which would receive the direction for an action from the processor and must be able to control and change the state of things connected to the network.

- A thing again, we will call it a worker, on the network that is capable of accepting the direction to change its state. Note that there is a thing at the start of the solution and a thing at the end of the solution, the first can be considered the input thing and the last the output thing – just like humans have been providing inputs to computers and then acting on the output.

- A data communication channel that allows data to flow from the originating thing all the way to the controlled thing, through the devices listed above.

You can implement an Internet of Things solution in a small way – only capture data and let a human view it and take decisions and actions – or go the whole hog where the solution runs itself with no human intervention.

The ride is not all that easy though. There are several challenges that could come in the way of the Internet of Things growing as rapidly as you would imagine.

- Security: While cyber security has been a challenge to computers for many years now, the risk and impact of a cyber-attack on IoT solutions is far higher. Computers and networks targeted for cyber-attacks were generally in the realm of enterprise applications, where the risk was more in the areas of data theft, financial fraud and online reputation damage. With the Internet of Things, if everything around you is also connected to the network and can be remotely controlled, then the risks grow exponentially. Cyber-attacks can shut down a smart factory, break into a smart home, disrupt a smart city and generally intrude into any aspect of your individual life where you use a connected thing.

- Network Bandwidth: Network bandwidth is already congested with the vast amounts of data being transferred to users every minute. If the same network is now loaded with billions of additional things that will also continuously send data back and forth across this network, the capacity requirements will increase significantly. Technology upgrades such as fiber cables in fixed line networks, 5G in cellular data networks and IPV6 to increase the number of IP addresses (device identifiers) are slowly emerging to address these limitations. A very close analogy is the road infrastructure in a city. As the number of vehicles increase, the roads will have to be widened or new roads will have to be built to allow the traffic to continue to flow smoothly.

- Interoperability: Computer networks have evolved to a point where standard communication and data protocols - think TCP/IP and HTTP(S) - are used and all types of computers can communicate with each other on any network. But the Internet of Things does not yet have standardized protocols. It would be of limited use if you had things that could only communicate with a few of your other things. While IoT solution providers will surely converge on a set of standards, it could take a while.

- Battery Power: Many things will be mobile or remotely located, away from a power supply. Also, many things will have a very small form factor and may not be able to accommodate a bulky battery. Battery power is currently expensive and still needs a large form factor or frequent recharging. Hence, all things will have to be designed to consume very low power which is a challenge given that they need to almost continuously be using cellular data transmission, which is a power guzzler. And in many applications, it would not help or even be unsafe if the things you relied on ran out of battery at critical time.

Even with all these challenges, there is no doubt that the Internet of Things is the way forward and will be a part of all aspects of our life in the very near future. If done right, it could change the world once again, just as the Internet, the World Wide Web and smart phones changed the world in the last two decades.