Solving (OEM/B2B/B2C) IOT Design Challenges – Part 4 Connectivity Components

This is one of the design parameters that perhaps most depends on how close the business purpose is to the consumer side or industrial side of the spectrum. One needs to know whether the solution works non-stop 24x7, whether its degradation or stoppage can cause severe loss of property or life or both, how timely or real-timely (and frequently) how much of the data should reach the server or be digested for decision maker’s action or for the actuator to act.

Numerous physical and logical topologies and protocols are available and often more than one can fit the bill. New protocols for wired and wireless connectivity, in the standards domain or proprietary domain, are reported at unpredictable times, and that needs to be factored into the equation.

Apart from considerations of safety, security, reliability, longevity and power availability, the choice can severely impact even the performance, scalability and resilience of the solution.

Some of the technologies are better known, such as Wi-Fi, cellular, Bluetooth, MQTT, Zigbee, CANbus, fieldbus. There are also lesser known options like CoAP, LWM2M, 6LoWPAN, Thread, BLE, IPv6, Sigfox KNX, HART, PoE, and EnOcean. Of these, some of the newer and exciting options are often desirable, as LWM2M, 6LoWPAN, BLE but should not be blindly chosen without understanding what is commonly used or about to be introduced in a particular industry, enterprise or plant.

One of the most ubiquitous due to its simplicity is Bluetooth, which is most widely used for consumer short-range devices. Its challenges lie in the security, range and power perspective for some applications. While Zigbee is famous for its mesh and mid-range capabilities, other contenders are closing in on this too.

Some protocols are geared to vehicle communications, while others are architected or standardized for building automation to monitor and control lighting, climate actuators, media streaming, conferencing systems and appliances in home or office. Some perform hierarchical communications while others implement distributed communication which is better suited to achieve autonomy, scalability, flexibility, expandability and resilience in an industrial or Factory 4.0 environment.

High levels of security and authentication are the hallmark of some new protocols, while others have advanced the concept of energy harvesting for 24x7 machine-to-machine communications. This reduces or eliminates the need for separate recharging of most devices collecting critical continuous data.

Connectivity technologies are the important bridges from sensors to embedded devices and machine intelligence to gateways to servers to AI analytics to mobile and PC clients where data is presented in dashboards, graphs, charts and reports or even soon via intelligent chat-bots.

The best prepared and performing solutions will mull over what already exists, consider push/ pull/ subscribe/ on-demand or AI-based interactions with other systems, and also understand the data-homogenizations and power needs at different points in the network.