Your wrist watch sending your heart pulse, temperature and BP to your doctor and medical record, on exceeding set limit, is an example of Internet of Things (IoT) and I’m sure you are hearing about Internet of Things from long. But still many of us need more clarity on what it is?
Is it networking of the things?
It is communication between heterogeneous devices?
Is it Machine to Machine Communication?
Is it one step ahead in automation?
In fact, it’s ALL of the above!
We all know that today’s internet devices are connected to the network based on unique IP Address allocated to the device. Therefore devices are able to communicate with each other. But lets us expand the base from internet connected devices to other physical things and see how other things can become part of it.
Conceptually to communicate with each other, what we need i
s
- Unique identification
- Communication channel
- Information or data for communication
- Information processing & Events for communication
To achieve unique identification, we can attach any of the below with our physical thing to identify it uniquely
- IP Address
- GPS device ID
- RFID
- Bluetooth Address etc.
Further any of the supported communication channel can be used for data transmission such as,
- TCP/IP or http protocols or FTP
- GPRS or SMS through SIM module
- Radio waves
The data / information can be collected by any of the following
- Sensors
- Receivers
- Readers
- & Output from programs or processing
Finally firmware program or resident software programs are used to run on the connected device to process data/information & invoke communication either on a
- Particular Event
- Or a given Frequency
The solution created from permutation and combination of all above is nothing but Internet of Things, That’s it.
