Internet Of Things - The Smart World
This era always enlightens us to dream about the smart world. Like take an example of how about a smart home? How would it be when your appliances would be bidding automatically? What would you feel when your lights would switch on automatically while you walk on the floor throughout? How about your alarm starts ringing and your brewing coffee gets ready to start your day? If your home becomes your friend, start recognizing your voice and follow your commands like turning on the TV news or reading your schedule, then how many butterflies would be flying in your stomach for such a house? This all happens due to one new technology known as the Internet of Things or the Internet of Everything that have helped people to achieve all the science fiction dreams that they used to satiate watching sci-fi movies.
What is Internet of Things?
The Internet of Things (IoT) or the Internet of Everything (IoE) are the web-enabled devices. They can process by collecting, sending and acting on the advices that they get from the surroundings using sensors, processors and communication hardware. These are the “smart devices” as often known as, and can talk to other devices which is known as the machine-to-machine (M2M) communication. They act on the words given to each other. These devices especially prefer to work on their own without any intervention but you can give commands to set them up, or for accessing data. Today’s mobile elements and the always online notion of home and business networks have made it easy to set up this new technology.
How Internet of things work?
The system has four distinct components which I will discuss as what these each components are and what are their uses respectively. These four components are as follows:
- Sensors/Devices: Sensors or devices perform the function of collecting data from the surroundings. But sensors are not simple as this. A sensor is not just to sense things. It is as variable as the features of your mobile phone. It starts from sensing a simple temperature degree to a complex video feed. So it does not matter whether the sensor only works as a sense standalone function or as a device of jack of all trades, it has primarily to do something on gathering information.
- Connectivity: So after collecting information, the data has to be stored at a place. This place is the cloud storage. But how to get there? The sensors/devices are connected to the cloud by a different type of method. These methods are cellular, satellite, WiFi, Bluetooth, LPWAN and so on. The IoT application suggests as to which connectivity would be the best, but all of them has the same task- getting the data to the cloud.
- Data Processing: When the data is stored in the cloud then the processing starts. It sees simple to complex issues as the reading of the temperature in an acceptable range or to identify objects in videos using computer vision. But when there is an intruder in your house or the temperature is too high, this is where the user comes in.
- User Interface: This is a very interesting component. Here the end-user gets the information via notifications such as mails, texts or it allows to actively check in the other system. This makes it very helpful for the end-user as when he or she gets a notification that the temperature is very high in the cold storage he or she can control the temperature via the app on his or her phone. Even sometimes the actions are done automatically by this new tech due to some pre-defined rules or even sometimes before notifying the end-user about an intruder they also inform relevant authorities about it.
LiFi & Internet Of Things
LiFi which is basically the abbreviation of ‘light fidelity’ is a wireless communication technology. It credits the high-speed transmission of data in between devices. It communicates through light emitting diodes (LEDs). It uses non-intermediate frequencies in the RF systems and gets in hold inexpensive stuffs such as off-shell LEDs and photo detectors. Therefore, it allows for a less complex simple small transceiver that enable any LED light to transmit high speed data.
So, when dream of smart world, people need to make sci-fi more efficient. This efficiency is brought by the use of LiFi in the IoT technology. It is because use of large amounts of power cannot be allowed. Therefore, LiFi should be used as it is so fast that it surpasses thousands of WiFis by just utilizing light instead of radio waves. This technology is being researched and are given trials by many universities and companies and have received a substantial investment from the EPSRC. If this successfully happens a blend of LiFi and Internet of Things will take human technology and life to a next level.
If you want to know more about LiFi Technology - https://digihashtag.com/lifi-technology/