Internet of Things(IoT)?

Internet of Things is one of the pioneering technologies in this modern era. It is a concept/solution model to connect physical objects to the Internet and to communicate with each other effectively. Physical objects can be buildings, vehicles, home appliances, offices, security cameras.. etc. As we know, every object has certain attributes and properties associated with it. In order to convert any object into an IoT smart object, we need to provide unique identification and a tiny sensor to an object. In this way, sensor gather all information from the environment and send data for processing.

There are few major reasons why IoT solutions are recommended by experts,

• To Improve the quality of present business processes by automation
• To monitor/control each remote object effectively and to get live updates
• Multitasking would be possible and it help us to manage our time wisely
• To increase revenue generation of any organization
• Prediction of the health risks and environmental damages.

Already available smart devices are,

• Wearable sensors used in medical field to check blood pressure and heart rate.
• Activity Trackers such as Fitbit, TomTom to find fitness-related metrics such as distance walked or run, calories consumption.
• Security Alarms at Homes and Cars.
• Smart meters at homes and Office units to identify the energy consumption.
• Remote sensors to collect data by detecting the energy that is reflected from Earth. These sensors can be on satellites or mounted on aircraft. It helps to prepare and protect from any hazardous event.

Also, few companies have already implemented IoT solutions for their customers.

For instance,

• Spark New Zealand telecom provider has launched an IoT solution a year ago called ‘Morepork’ to monitor and control home security via mobile phones.
• Samsung 'SmartThings' also provided an IoT solution called smarter homes.
• 'Google Nest' offered home security solution.
• ASB bank using smart meters solution to control and monitor energy consumption in their offices provided by Vodafone Global M2M.
• Bosch offers cloud smart solution for 'Bosch Secure Truck Parking' for insufficient truck parking spaces, operators can go online and inform their customer about the available parking. Truckers can plan ahead and make the reservation. A camera compares the licence plate of the truck with the reservation details, if it matches automatically gate opens.

Good news is that we can achieve IoT solution prototype through available open platform service technologies.

Open source hardwares are available in the market to connect all IoT devices. For example, now a days Arduino, Raspberry Pi boards are used as small computers to retrieve all sensory data and post them to target system.

As an example, I have taken Raspberry Pi and Sensor Tag In the below diagram.

Raspberry Pi is a tiny board which has USB ports including micro USB, Ethernet port and SD card slot, HDMI in it. Also, it has inbuilt Audio Camera. To enable communication with sensors it has several general purpose I/P O/P (GPIO) pins in it.

Sensors are small devices which are used to detect and collect all sensory data around them.

There are several different types of sensors available to detect sensible information such as measuring temperature, light, allocating GPS position and physical conditions etc.

Sensor tag is a tiny device which has many inbuilt sensors and a low power consuming battery in it. We can also use Bluetooth to stream sensor data to Raspberry PI from sensor tag.

We can directly use GPIO pins of raspberry Pi to connect sensors. For prototype, breadboards can be used to connect sensors / sensor tag to Raspberry Pi computers GPIO pins using bread board wires. Monitor or laptop screen can be connected via HDMI port.

Python script is a primary programming language for Raspberry Pi and it can easily identify and read sensor values from GPIO pins and post messages to IoT services. IoT services can be enabled in HANA cloud platform.

IoT scenario in SAP space is the current trending topic in the SAP world. HANA Cloud Platform offered by SAP as an open service platform where we can enable IoT services.

SAP supports two types of protocols such as HTTP, Web Sockets through which data will be transmitted back and forth.

IoT Gateway is a bridge between sensors/actors and LAN/WAN. Communication technology used by sensors/actors are Bluetooth LE, ZigBee, Z-ware, etc...

SAP HANA cloud platform offers IoT cockpit to manage and control devices which are connected to outside SAP world. Below screen grab for reference.

Through MMS- Message management services, we can control/monitor the messages and configure the Data services. There are two types of protocol available in cockpit HTTP and Web socket

SAP is handling all business data in In-Memory platform. Furthermore, SAP’s Dynamic Edge Processing technique provides a secure, managed IoT solution. As a result, SAP securely transmit data from edge sensors to core digital systems.

Some experts anticipate that by year 2030 the IoT is going to rule the business world and bring enormous changes in our daily lives. In my opinion. It is time for us to embrace this new solution model and contribute ourselves to design creative IoT projects as much as possible and help the world to improve.

Note : The aim of this article is to share my knowledge which I have acquired from various internet sites.