Entering the IOT world

“If you think that the internet has changed your life, think again. The IoT is about to change it all over again!” — Brendan O’Brien

Ever imagined of a world where your things can talk you back? Where you can ask to your fridge how is it feeling and it will answer back? A world where you can know how your house is doing when you are on vacation? Well that world is here and now. Thanks to the IoT, don't wait anymore, there's a lot to do since there are a lot of things to ask questions to, indeed, anybody can participate in an IoT solution.

What's IOT?

Let's start by splitting IoT (Internet of things) into the meaning of every one of the worlds, the internet means interconnection, as a way to communicate but what are we going to communicate? yeah, you are right things, this sounds kind of vaguely since a thing could be anything, a car, a house, a plant, your watch, but yeah, the idea of IoT is being able to obtain data of every kind of object by the use of the appropriate sensor; so that actions can be automatized in the future.

Let's go deeper into concepts, what's the internet? internet is a global network in which there are servers and clients, clients make requests and servers are always ready to handle this clients request, we could say that these server/clients are computers, but let's better call them devices. These devices send/receive useful data, for example, your watch could make a petition to the server on the internet and ask for what time is it, the server will give a response, and this way we are communicating the watch with something on the internet for a purpose.

Why is it used?

IoT has the power of offering a society to grow in many aspects, some projects created with IoT are Smart Water Management, Smart Environment, Healthcare, Smart Agriculture, Smart Waste Management, Smart Safety, Smart Supply Chain, etc. If you notice there's a pattern. Water management it's something that we have always done as a human being (assigning a certain quantity of water for every task of the house for example) but we do it without data, that's when IoT comes from, giving us data-driven decisions making it "smart".

Why some electronic boards like Arduino, raspberry pi, or beagleboard are brought to the table when we speak about IoT? well basically any device with computational power and peripherals to connect to the world can be used in IoT, but some special considerations are taken in count depending on the task that we want to accomplish.

Let's say that we want to monitor buses all day long to notice when some bus might not be behaving correctly, of course, we could put a normal computer with a whole operating system to collect the data, but that would mean configuring the operative system, configuring the hardware, and the computer resources for that simple task. This might be too much, so, cheaper options are these electronic boards, which allows us to handle computational resources with low-cost, low-consumption, and still being able of handling the task.

Usually, how does it works? let's say that we need to measure the temp of our baby's room, so we could get an Arduino and a temperature sensor to gather the signal after we connect everything and leave it in order, we need to store the data values somewhere, that somewhere could be a server on the internet, so we need to give our Arduino an internet connection this could be done easily with a WiFi dongle, after we corroborate that everything is alright we can enjoy our signals being stored and our application working.

You may be wondering, do we have to use only WiFi to apply IoT? well, the answer is no, any communication protocol is useful to have communication with the things, for houses the most popular are Xbee but any protocol like Bluetooth, Wifi, RF Protocols, LTE-A, and WiFi-Direct, can be used according to the situation, at the end what matters is to be able of getting access to that information.

Real life example of IOT

What's the use of all the data we gather from objects, well, in summary, we have to use it to improve human life, one real example of IoT can be found in North America, in San Diego people are gathering data through cameras to understand where the peak of traffic is occurring, so that they can be able of rerouting cars during peak hours to avoid pedestrian accidents and alleviate congestion.

This is the concept of smart cities, with the use of IoT they can understand the behavior of things to bring advantage to humanity, increasing safety, reduce delays and overall using data to make better decisions.

In Florida, a smart house owner can obtain information from his plants and automatize common tasks like watering or cleaning the floor, which in the end it's going to mean to save time and optimize resource to have a good life, self-ordering fridges, self-cleaning rooms, these are some of the ways of using IoT to facilitate modern life.

IoT changing the world we know

If you can do anything with IoT why I didn't use it before? it's because even if the concept exists it's so useful that we don't have to know about it to use it, let's come with a commercial example in the health field, medics would love to know how certain variables of a patient are behaving even when he's outside of the hospital, like his pulse rate, here health brands are already in use, they can register how the pulse is behaving long time and alert of emergency levels to our medics.

It looks that IoT could save a lot of lives by even being able of knowing where is the people right? why don't we have cities like in the movies, where you can see that everything is communicating at the same time? If something needs to be replaced before it causes a tragedy? Well here we have to face social issues, in some countries people don't even have access to the internet, especially in rural zones is hard to get access to a network, improving the zones infrastructure is one of the first things we have to tackle to implement IoT.

Security: 

IoT is the reason behind the new standard ipv6 (a protocol to handle a lot of more devices on the internet) we are going to have a lot of new devices connected all time to the internet, but it's also true that for any new devices a new vulnerability can be found and so our information security may be a concern, especially considering that behind IOT cheap devices with low-security systems can be used, which means that to say budget these devices may not implement any security system at all.

What do I mean with vulnerabilities? Vulnerabilities are ways that some people have to get access to a system and do something by using the other system resources, think about if this vulnerability was a little hole that some people can use to enter into your system extract information and use it from the inside.

Privacy:

Data gathered should only be used to accomplish one certain task, when other people get access to that data and use it for a purpose that the device wasn't intended to, then we have privacy issues, you may think: If I buy the expensive device in the planet my data is going to be safe right?

This is not true at all, let's say that you want the last smart house with some incredible security systems so that nobody could have a peek on your data (which could mean receiving spam on your e-mail or even giving your credit information to somebody else), also high security can mean that nobody could ever stop your service from working.

But also let's say that people found a vulnerability in the cheapest smart-house in the market, so they can use it as their own attack server, this will mean that those people would connect to the house of your neighbor and then use all the computational power they have to attack the server in which your data is being stored, which still could cut your service or even be used to extract your personal information.

Standards: 

One common solution when having concerns about security and privacy is to define protocol standards, however in IoT, we are talking about millions of devices connected, this is means that we are also talking about a lot of manufactures in mind, everybody can share the information according to of how they think better, but of course, if they don't have in mind a security layer, from the design phase, people are going to be able to sniff the information from their devices.

Trained workforce:

IoT can be applied to anywhere which means that everybody can use it, in this order of ideas, to install it and being able of doing something customized for every case, we need more people that understand how these devices can communicate with each other, how to correctly gather data for a large number of times and also important how to solve the problem by using the data securely.

There's another important consideration about IoT, this field can always be improved let's say that we want to monitor all the bridges around the town, but we have a little problem, in some places we don't have access to an energy source, and providing one could be too expensive for the project, researchers are really important, so that we can optimize and use an alternative source of energy, not only like wind, solar or hydro; but also sources that could be perfect for IoT like energy harvesting.

Energy harvesting it's the dream for almost any IoT project since we are surrounded by a lot of electromagnetic waves; imagine that any sensor we have could harvest the energy of this waves and be able to function in almost any place of the world without the need of advance installations, self-powered IoT is what we have to aim to give any people, in any place of the world to have a better life.

References

[1]S. Joyce, "Solving the IoT privacy problem", PwC, 2020. [Online]. Available: https://www.pwc.com/us/en/services/consulting/cybersecurity/library/broader-perspectives/solving-iot-privacy-problem.html. [Accessed: 19- Aug- 2020]

[2]H. Yadav, "IoT: Challenges and Issues in Indian Perspective - IEEE Conference Publication", Ieeexplore.ieee.org, 2020. [Online]. Available: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8519869. [Accessed: 19- Aug- 2020]

[3]A. Meola, "How smart city technology & the Internet of Things will change our apartments, grids and communities", Business Insider, 2020. [Online]. Available: https://www.businessinsider.com/iot-smart-city-technology. [Accessed: 19- Aug- 2020]