Beginners Guide to IoT
Before IoT was introduced, concept called IoP(Internet of People) was popular. It was the connection and communication that happens between the people.
Later on there was a necessity for the devices, sensors, software to communicate between each other same as the people do. In that case new concept called IoT(Internet of Things) was introduced to facilitate the communication between the devices(smartphones, computers etc) through the internet.In here thing refers to any device that consists some kind of built in sensors which enables to exchange and collect data over the network or through the internet without any human interaction.
For example:
Person enters his house in a day with heavy rain and temperature is really low outside, Coffee machine starts to make a hot coffee, heater starts to boil water for a shower, A/C gets switched off happens automatically. That is the beauty of IoT. Without the human intervention, devices interact each other and start to work independently. All these things happens when sensors, collect information of outside weather and transfers them to the connected devices over the internet. This whole process is a real world example of the use of IoT.
IoT Architecture
There is no specific architecture for IoT, It depends on the solution you are looking for. For any type of architecture below 4 components need to be present. They are the core components of the IoT architecture.
- Sensors/actuators
- Data Acquisition Systems/Internet Gateway
- Edge IT
- Data Center/Cloud
Stage 1
Sensors/Actuators
A sensor is a device that detects and responds to some type of input from the physical environment.
Sensors pick up the physical parameters and converts them to useful data.One common example is gyroscope in your smart phone. Orientation of the mobile phones are detected through the Accelerometers. With the use of gyroscope it provides additional dimensions to track the rotation. On the other hand actuators has the ability to intervene to the change in the physical conditions. For an example,
Sensors identifies the temperature change in side your living room, sensors process those data and decides temperature is below the expected limit and actuator in that case switch on the air conditioner for you.
Stage 2
Data Acquisition Systems/Internet Gateway
Normally data comes as in the analog format from the sensors. To be futher processed they need to be converted to digital format. Data Acquisition Systems or DAS performs these conversions and does the data aggregation for you.
Data aggregation is the process in which data is gathered and analysed to express them in a meaningful and summarized form.
Then the Internet Gateways are there to receive those information and route them to the LAN's’ over the internet for the further processing. These systems have close proximity to the Stage 1 devices.
What is the need of converting analog data?
It is must to convert incoming data from the sensors to digital format and pre process them. One main reason for this is the large amount of data comes from the sensors. Think of a complex system like NASA rocket engine. Do you think it generates small amount of data at once. Answer is absolutely No. It may generate 30–60 TB/s. Think of that huge amount of data coming to the data centers without processing them. It will be heck of a task to analyzes them. Also adding to that analog data have specialized form of characteristics which needs specialized versions of the software to process. Hence it is best to do pre processing before data is been transferred to the data centers.
Stage 3
Edge IT
Edge IT systems are more frequently located close to the sensors. Main reason for this is to reduce the bandwidth consumption by the data to be processed. In these systems they analyse and further do processing of the digitized data. Edge IT systems are used to process and generate meaningful results while passing them to the next stage. Also from the Edge IT systems we can project the relevant data and send to the particular device rather than sending all the data to every device connected. If not it could eat up the network bandwidth of the whole process.
Stage 4
Data Center/Cloud
All the analyzed data from the previous stages ultimately comes to the data centers. These could be located physically or in the cloud platform. In this stage more powerful analyzing and storage of data is taken place. Data which need further processing is analyzed deeply in these data data centers. As there is a deep analyzes taking place it takes longer time than in the analysis happened in the previous stages.
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