Things To Do And Be
Susanne Sima
The Internet of things (IoT) describes devices with sensors, processing ability, software and other technologies that connect and exchange data with other devices and systems over the Internet or other communications networks.[1][2][3][4][5] The Internet of things encompasses electronics, communication and computer science engineering. Internet of things has been considered a misnomer because devices do not need to be connected to the public internet, they only need to be connected to a network,[6] and be individually addressable.[7][8]
Things to Do and Be
The field has evolved due to the convergence of multiple technologies, including ubiquitous computing, commodity sensors, and increasingly powerful embedded systems, as well as machine learning.[9] Older fields of embedded systems, wireless sensor networks, control systems, automation (including home and building automation), independently and collectively enable the Internet of things.[10] In the consumer market, IoT technology is most synonymous with "smart home" products, including devices and appliances (lighting fixtures, thermostats, home security systems, cameras, and other home appliances) that support one or more common ecosystems[clarification needed], and can be controlled via devices associated with that ecosystem, such as smartphones and smart speakers. IoT is also used in healthcare systems.[11]
The concept of the "Internet of things" and the term itself, first appeared in a speech by Peter T. Lewis, to the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation 15th Annual Legislative Weekend in Washington, D.C., published in September 1985.[19] According to Lewis, "The Internet of Things, or IoT, is the integration of people, processes and technology with connectable devices and sensors to enable remote monitoring, status, manipulation and evaluation of trends of such devices."[20]
The term "Internet of things" was coined independently by Kevin Ashton of Procter & Gamble, later of MIT's Auto-ID Center, in 1999,[21] though he prefers the phrase "Internet for things".[22] At that point, he viewed radio-frequency identification (RFID) as essential to the Internet of things,[23] which would allow computers to manage all individual things.[24][25][26] The main theme of the Internet of things is to embed short-range mobile transceivers in various gadgets and daily necessities to enable new forms of communication between people and things, and between things themselves.[27]
Defining the Internet of things as "simply the point in time when more 'things or objects' were connected to the Internet than people", Cisco Systems estimated that the IoT was "born" between 2008 and 2009, with the things/people ratio growing from 0.08 in 2003 to 1.84 in 2010.[29]
The Ocean of Things project is a DARPA-led program designed to establish an Internet of things across large ocean areas for the purposes of collecting, monitoring, and analyzing environmental and vessel activity data. The project entails the deployment of about 50,000 floats that house a passive sensor suite that autonomously detect and track military and commercial vessels as part of a cloud-based network.[108]
There are several applications of smart or active packaging in which a QR code or NFC tag is affixed on a product or its packaging. The tag itself is passive, however, it contains a unique identifier (typically a URL) which enables a user to access digital content about the product via a smartphone.[109] Strictly speaking, such passive items are not part of the Internet of things, but they can be seen as enablers of digital interactions.[110] The term "Internet of Packaging" has been coined to describe applications in which unique identifiers are used, to automate supply chains, and are scanned on large scale by consumers to access digital content.[111] Authentication of the unique identifiers, and thereby of the product itself, is possible via a copy-sensitive digital watermark or copy detection pattern for scanning when scanning a QR code,[112] while NFC tags can encrypt communication.[113]
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 (by companies such as Intel) to integrate the concepts of the IoT and autonomous control, with initial outcomes towards this direction considering objects as the driving force for autonomous IoT.[120] An approach in this context is deep reinforcement learning where most of IoT systems provide a dynamic and interactive environment.[121] Training an agent (i.e., IoT device) to behave smartly in such an environment cannot be addressed by conventional machine learning algorithms such as supervised learning. By reinforcement learning approach, a learning agent can sense the environment's state (e.g., sensing home temperature), perform actions (e.g., turn HVAC on or off) and learn through the maximizing accumulated rewards it receives in long term.
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) and 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 object's ability to detect changes in the environment (faults affecting sensors) and introduce suitable mitigation measures constitutes a major research trend,[124] 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 and intelligent cyber-physical systems to be deployed in real environments.[125]
IoT system architecture, in its simplistic view, consists of three tiers: Tier 1: Devices, Tier 2: the Edge Gateway, and Tier 3: the Cloud.[126] Devices include networked things, such as the sensors and actuators found in IoT equipment, particularly those that use protocols such as Modbus, Bluetooth, Zigbee, or proprietary protocols, to connect to an Edge Gateway.[126] The Edge Gateway layer consists of sensor data aggregation systems called Edge Gateways that provide functionality, such as pre-processing of the data, securing connectivity to cloud, using systems such as WebSockets, the event hub, and, even in some cases, edge analytics or fog computing.[126] Edge Gateway layer is also required to give a common view of the devices to the upper layers to facilitate in easier management. The final tier includes the cloud application built for IoT using the microservices architecture, which are usually polyglot and inherently secure in nature using HTTPS/OAuth. It includes various database systems that store sensor data, such as time series databases or asset stores using backend data storage systems (e.g. Cassandra, PostgreSQL).[126] The cloud tier in most cloud-based IoT system features event queuing and messaging system that handles communication that transpires in all tiers.[127] Some experts classified the three-tiers in the IoT system as edge, platform, and enterprise and these are connected by proximity network, access network, and service network, respectively.[128]
Building on 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.[citation needed]
The Internet of things requires huge scalability in the network space to handle the surge of devices.[129] IETF 6LoWPAN can be used to connect devices to IP networks. With billions of devices[130] being added to the Internet space, IPv6 will play a major role in handling the network layer scalability. IETF's Constrained Application Protocol, ZeroMQ, and MQTT can provide lightweight data transport. In practice many groups of IoT devices are hidden behind gateway nodes and may not have unique addresses. Also the vision of everything-interconnected is not needed for most applications as it is mainly the data which need interconnecting at a higher layer.
Decentralized Internet of things, or decentralized IoT, is a modified IoT which utilizes fog computing to handle and balance requests of connected IoT devices in order to reduce loading on the cloud servers and improve responsiveness for latency-sensitive IoT applications like vital signs monitoring of patients, vehicle-to-vehicle communication of autonomous driving, and critical failure detection of industrial devices.[133] Performance is improved, especially for huge IoT systems (IoTS) with millions of nodes.[134]
In semi-open or closed loops (i.e., value chains, whenever a global finality can be settled) the IoT will often be considered and studied as a complex system[142] due to the huge number of different links, interactions between autonomous actors, and its capacity to integrate new actors. At the overall stage (full open loop) it will likely be seen as a chaotic environment (since systems always have finality). As a practical approach, not all elements on the Internet of things run in a global, public space. Subsystems are often implemented to mitigate the risks of privacy, control and reliability. For example, domestic robotics (domotics) running inside a smart home might only share data within and be available via a local network.[143] Managing and controlling a high dynamic ad hoc IoT things/devices network is a tough task with the traditional networks architecture, Software Defined Networking (SDN) provides the agile dynamic solution that can cope with the special requirements of the diversity of innovative IoT applications.[144][145]
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