The Internet of Things (IoT) is a concept of a data transmission network, which allows transmitting data between physical objects (“things”) fitted with built-in tools and technologies to interact with each other or with the external environment. Establishing such networks is expected to be capable of restructuring economic and social processes and excluding the need for human participation from part of actions and operations.
Usage
This concept has been actively implemented over the past two decades and has been used in many areas:
- Smart Home. With a system of sensors and devices controlled over the Internet, it allows setting up a variety of usage patterns based on the house owner’s needs. For example, turn off all electrical appliances and turn on the alarm upon leaving the house. And when the owner returns, brew their favorite coffee or tea, and turn on their favorite music. It is possible to tailor any number of scenarios to your needs.
- Hospitality industry. Conceptually, it is similar to a smart home just is scaled to a hotel building. With the help of sensors, you can monitor the indoor climate in all rooms and timely notice and correct deviations from the norm. The simplest use example is to automatically turn on air conditioning or heating in the room in advance when guests check in, and they will immediately find themselves in a favorable environment.
- To ensure high-quality production, it is necessary to track how materials and finished products are stored, transported, whether there are any deviations in the performance of machines and equipment, and whether technological conditions are observed. Here various sensors, automatic collection, and analysis of their readings can help.
- Agriculture. Here a system of sensors and microclimate control is used too: humidity, illumination, temperature, etc.
- Freight traffic. It has become widespread in road transportation. It is used to track the vehicles’ location and mileage, capture speed, acceleration, braking, control fuel consumption and checkpoint passing, monitor the observance of the work and rest schedule by drivers, provide telematics for refrigerating plants and sensitive cargo, etc.
- Various types of transport sharing (cars, bicycles, scooters). The system tracks who, when, and for how long rents the vehicle, how the vehicle is used, where and in what condition it is, what payment to take from the leaser, and whether it is time for vehicle maintenance.
There are more and more areas and scenarios for IoT usage. They are limited only by the needs of human activity automation and fantasy.
Implementation
What should be implemented to put the IoT concept into practice?
- The IoT devices themselves. Such devices must be physically capable of connecting to data networks by wire and/or wireless. Also, they must have firmware capable of receiving and executing control commands and/or transmitting the necessary data.
- Cloud or server infrastructure for connecting IoT devices. Together with the firmware of the devices themselves, they are the core of any IoT system, without which the system cannot function. This also includes a set of protocols and messaging engines.
- Applications that make it possible to control IoT devices. These can be mobile, desktop, and web applications, voice assistants (Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, etc.). All at once, one of them, or any combinations. Everything depends on the needs that the IoT system solves and its use scenarios.
- The engines for the collection and analysis of data from IoT devices are an important part of the IoT system. They are eyes and ears that help to observe what is happening in the system right now, whether everything is working correctly or something is going wrong and requires human intervention.
- Any system develops. Sooner or later, there will be a need to make changes for new use cases, new business, or user needs. Therefore, it is very important to provide from the beginning a system and mechanism to safely update the firmware remotely.
Our IoT projects
ITS has extensive experience in the design and implementation of software for IoT systems. Moreover, we have experience in the development of all of the listed above components.
For example, one of the implemented projects is the IoT system core for Netgear. The cloud infrastructure supports communication with about 10 million devices that are constantly online. We have released firmware for more than 200 models of the customer’s IoT devices.
Another example is the implementation of all components of the IoT system for Smart Home. Users can access the home video surveillance system with their smartphone or web browser, adjust the brightness and color of light with Alexa, and more. Arlo engineers have access to detailed analytics on the serviced IoT devices and cloud infrastructure. ITS employees regularly release firmware updates that are safely delivered to the devices and make updates, adding new functionality for the users.