The year 2017 is seeing a rapid explosion in the field of Internet of Things (IoT), with companies striving to come up with solutions that cater to various needs of the customer.
The year 2017 is seeing a rapid explosion in the field of Internet of Things (IoT), with companies striving to come up with solutions that cater to various needs of the customer. In a recent report the research firm Gartner listed the major IoT technologies that should receive importance in the next two years.
According to Nick Jones, VP and distinguished analyst at the research firm, the IoT demands an extensive range of new technologies and skills that many organizations are yet to master. "A recurring theme in the IoT space is the immaturity of technologies and services and of the vendors providing them. Architecting for this immaturity and managing the risk it creates will be a key challenge for organizations exploiting the IoT. In many technology areas, lack of skills will also pose significant challenges."
IoT security
The arrival of several connected devices has clearly given rise to discussions on their vulnerability to malicious attempts. Stringent security measures are inevitable to keep the connected devices up and running without any issues.
"Experienced IoT security specialists are scarce, and security solutions are currently fragmented and involve multiple vendors," said Mr. Jones. "New threats will emerge through 2021 as hackers find new ways to attack IoT devices and protocols, so long-lived "things" may need updatable hardware and software to adapt during their life span."
IoT analytics
Perhaps the most powerful aspect of IoT will be the data that it will be able to collect from each intelligent device that is a part of the network. From companies’ point of view, this data will provide valuable insights into how customers interact with the devices and consumer behavior itself. However, Gartner points out that IoT requires new and innovative analytic approaches.
IoT device (thing) management
The IoT will bring in an increase in the need for device monitoring, firmware and software updates, diagnostics, crash analysis and reporting, physical management, and security management. “The IoT also brings new problems of scale to the management task. Tools must be capable of managing and monitoring thousands and perhaps even millions of devices,” Gartner said.
Low-power, short-range IoT networks
There are several factors that need to be taken into consideration while choosing wireless networks. These include, range, battery life, bandwidth, density, endpoint and operational cost. Key here would be low-power, short-range networks, although many solutions will coexist with no single dominant winner.
Low-power, wide-area networks
According to Gartner, traditional cellular networks don’t deliver a good combination of technical features and operational costs for those IoT applications that need wide-area coverage combined with relatively low bandwidth, good battery life, low hardware and operating cost and high connection density.
“The long-term goal of a wide-area IoT network is to deliver data rates from hundreds of bits per second (bps) to tens of kilobits per second (kbps) with nationwide coverage, a battery life of up to 10 years, an endpoint hardware cost of around $5, and support for hundreds of thousands of devices connected to a base station or its equivalent,” the report said. “The first low-power wide-area networks (LPWANs) were based on proprietary technologies, but in the long term emerging standards such as Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) will likely dominate this space.”
IoT processors
Several factors of an IoT device, including their encryption strength, power consumption, support for operating systems etc. depend on the processor and framework that the device adopts. Just as all hardware creation, tradeoffs exist between hardware costs, software cost and so on.
IoT operating systems
IoT devices cannot be run on traditional operating systems that are meant for computers. These are power and resource hungry and often lack certain critical features. “They also have too large a memory footprint for small devices and may not support the chips that IoT developers use,” the report said. “Consequently, a wide range of IoT-specific operating systems has been developed to suit many different hardware footprints and feature needs.”
Event stream processing
Gartner pointed out that some IoT applications will create high data rates that should be analyzed in real time.
“Systems creating tens of thousands of events per second are common, and millions of events per second can occur in some telecom and telemetry situations,” the report said. “To address such requirements, distributed stream computing platforms (DSCPs) have emerged. They typically use parallel architectures to process very high-rate data streams to perform tasks such as real-time analytics and pattern identification.”
IoT platforms
Integrating several infrastructure components, IoT platforms play an important role. The services from these platforms can be categorized into three types. First, low-level device control and operations such as communications, device monitoring and management, security and firmware updates. Second, data acquisition, transformation and management, and third, IoT application development, including event-driven logic, application programming, visualizing, analytics and adapters to connect to enterprise systems.
IoT standards and ecosystems
Gartner points out that ecosystems and standards aren’t exactly technologies, but most end up as APIs. Standards and their APIs will be an integral part of IoT because the devices will need to interoperate and communicate.
“Many IoT ecosystems will emerge, and commercial and technical battles between these ecosystems will dominate areas such as the smart home, the smart city and healthcare,” the report said. “Organizations creating products may have to develop variants to support multiple standards or ecosystems and be prepared to update products during their life span as the standards evolve and new standards and related APIs emerge.”