Wednesday 13 February 2013

Internet of things

The year 2013 is called to be the year of internet of things(IoT) and the decade to be the Internet of Everything (IOE) . This technology means to make internet to be extended to make it a part of our lives, and our lives extended to be a part of internet.

Speaking of an example scenario, just imagine that every light switch, device (TV, Fridge) and door lock in your house being connected to each other and the internet. So that you can adjust the overall brigthness of your living room to your preferred level of lumens. Now imagine that you can do that from anywhere in the world, through your mobile phone?  

and then of these devices could theoretically be connected to a wider grid, containing for example street lights. The system could then measure the amount of light that your house emits, couple it together with the amount of light needed on the street and power the street lights accordingly. If you connect light sensors and motion sensors to the grid, you can have the lights follow your car on a highway and not have any lights anywhere where it is not needed. This interconnectedness is what machine to machine communications could become. This new internet can and will be an order of magnitude bigger than what we currently have.


Some characteristics and architectural details:
Radio-frequency identification (RFID) is  seen as a prerequisite for the Internet of Things
The idea of Unique addressability of things is based on the  RFID-tags and unique identification through the Electronic Product Code.
The system will likely be an example of event-driven architecture, bottom-up made
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. 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). The Internet of objects would encode 50 to 100 trillion objects, being a system of 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,
e.g.


Image courtesy :  http://fixingpotholes.com/blog/2010/07/18/the-internet-of-things-in-public/

An IBM introduction to the Internet of Things by Mike Wing, Andy Stanford-Clark and John Tolva



Some of the external Impacts and challenges induced:
1) IoT is the emerging reasearch area for the wireless sensor networks
With  IoT the data transmission requirements increase rapidly. So, the sensor nodes with limited capability and energy have to be taken care of in the transmission scenarios for better network life
MAC protocols design considerations like e.g. multiple channels for transmissions etc are to be considered.
2)With the increase in the network size and topology routing algorithms would always be challenged
3)... This list is long as the IoT is adding features and functionalities to the existing Internet as such so the reasearch problems would arise in say, every network layer.

References:
http://www.symplio.com/2011/09/4-infographics-about-internet-of-things/
http://www.arcticstartup.com/2013/02/06/the-next-decade-is-the-internet-of-things
http://www.iot-a.eu/public
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_of_Things

Devidas Puranik
(Roll no: 12CS60S02)

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