The Curious Case of The Internet of Things

When Kevin Ashton from Birmingham, England, coined the term “Internet of Things” in 1999 in a presentation to the executives, while working on RFID to better manage the supply chain at P&G – he surely was not in a position to predict the enormous impact this is going to make for humankind. It's interesting that Kevin actually preferred the term “Internet for Things", probably he intended to believe that The Internet is an enabler for the things to be connected.

It all started more than a decade before coining of the term - IoT. The first ever connected thing reported is the connected humble Coke vending machine in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania at the Carnegie Mellon University in 1982. Interestingly – this is before the World Wide Web came into existence – the Internet as popularly known today.

Not surprisingly, necessity, as always, was the mother of the invention. David Nichols, a graduate student at the Carnegie Mellon University’s computer science department used to crave for Coke and the vending machine was far away from his office and he used to be concerned before walking to the machine that it could be empty or if the machine has been refilled recently then the drinks will be warm. David worked with few other fellow students – Mike Kazar, Ivor Durham and John Zsarnay to put sensors on the vending machine to read the lights on the slots in the vending machine to identify if the slot is empty or has been refilled recently and send the sensed data to the ARPANET. Kazar wrote a programme to interpret the data from the sensor board to identify the status of the slots and the group later added the finger programme so that anyone connected to the ARPANET can use the command: finger coke@cmua?to find out if they should walk to the vending machine to fetch their thirst of soda or should stay where they are. By the way, Kazar never liked Coke though, he just wanted to see it working.

Few other events of significance happened leading up to the IoT revolution and coining of the term, which made them appear in the notice of everyone:

1990: Internet Toaster, by Simon Hackett, John Romkey, connected through SNMP:

1993: Connected Webcam, Cambridge University, by Dr. Stafford-Fraser. Probably the first connected webcam which appeared:

Not surprisingly, there is no single definition of IoT and it's been looked into from different angles – but all converging into the same ethos:

·?????A network connecting (either wired or wireless) devices, or ‘things’, that is characterized by autonomous provisioning, management, and monitoring. The IoT is innately analytical and integrated (IDC)

·?????IoT is the next evolution of the Internet, connecting the unconnected people, processes, data, and things in your business today (Cisco)

·?????Sensors & actuators connected by networks to computing systems. These systems can monitor or manage the health and actions of connected objects and machines. Connected sensors can also monitor the natural world, people, and animal” (McKinsey)

Let's talk some numbers now, so that the scale of the revolution can be realised. Here is a chart from IoT Analytics showing the growth trends and some projections:

And some snippets from various important voices on the growth trends:

·?????Internet of Things dominated the Internet in 2008-2009 when there were more devices using the Internet than people (Cisco)

·?????7 Billion devices were connected to the Internet by 2018 (IoT Analytics)

·?????Every second 127 new IoT devices are connected to the Internet (Securitytoday)

·?????Global IoT market is expected to exceed $1.5 trillion by 2025 (IoT Analytics)

·?????Over a quarter of all cyberattacks against businesses will be IoT-based by 2025 (Gartner)

Well, numbers are good but as Steven Glaser from UC Berkley nicely projected: “People want answers, and not numbers”

So, what type of answers the people can expect from the IoT revolution?

And all these questions are definitely answerable through the IoT revolution. The use cases which can be enabled through the IoT revolution is only up to the imagination for now as we have just scratched the surface at the moment.

Some of the use cases highlighted by GSMA Intelligence are here:

The IoT revolution is redefining what we call our homes and how we spend our time to do the day to day activities our home. Here is a home with connected devices:

It has got connected light bulbs to connected thermostats, connected toasters and coffee machines in the kitchen to the connected weighing scale and connected toothbrush in the toilet, from connected smart blinds to connected plant watering systems – you name it.

Now coming back to some of the fundamentals and intrinsic details of the IoT world, the way I see is that there are 4 pillars to IoT:

“Things” – Sensors and Actuators are the critical actors of the IoT world, sensors play the role so that the Things can inform about the parameter needed to perform some intelligent task and the actuators perform the task on the Things after getting the commands.

?Communication is the factor which makes it part of the “Internet”, the Things are connected to each other and to other entities to exchange data.

?Data exchange is the purpose of the entire setup, to and fro from the Things.

?Intelligence is the heart and brain of the ecosystem so that the data exchanged through the communication systems and generated by the Things are processed and intelligent decisions are taken.

?Here is a nice infographic from Postscapes to present the Things – the Sensors and Actuators:

Now, lets talk a bit about the communication landscape, zooming a little into the technical paradigm of the connectivity paradigm. The communication landscape in the IoT world can be broadly categorised into 2 groups, depending on the range of the connectivity:

·?????Fixed and short-ranged

·?????Long ranged

The main protocols and technologies used for these broad categorised can be summarised as:

Lets zoom into some of these:

With the acceleration in the number of devices getting connected and the impact it is making and will make in the coming days to humankind – it's very important to consider the implications of making the IoT world secure. For the Internet of Information – where a security breach can have financial implications or inconvenience, on the Internet of Things the implications could be life and death, just imagine a situation when a connected pacemaker is been compromised for security or when a connected car is compromised for security.

As the medical professionals take the Hippocratic Oath before stepping out of the academic world starting to apply their learning into the organic world, as the decisions they make has life and death implications, I believe the technology world is at a similar juncture where design decisions, lines of code have and will have life and death implications – so we may need to think of introducing Hippocratic Oath equivalent, even for a symbolic significance.

Quoting Albert Einstein: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them” – let's think differently.