The Internet of Things (IoT) will double the size of the internet over the next 20 years, and huge investments into that future are being made right now.
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What exactly is IoT?
The Internet of Things (or IoT) refers to the devices, connectivity and software used to interconnect these devices using the Internet infrastructure. According to Gartner, there will be nearly 26 billion devices on the Internet of Things by 2020. Each of the devices on the IoT will need to use a unique IP (Internet Protocol) address to identify itself to the other devices on the network. Due to the extremely large volume of devices that will come 'alive' on the IoT, the "things", which form the IoT, will use the new IPv6 naming scheme.
Why is IoT so important now?
The Internet of Things allows a large number of physical objects to be connected to the Internet and gives these objects the ability to communicate with other objects to exchange data with them thus enhancing the value of the object itself and the information that it provides to give valuable insight into its environment and functioning.
The most common examples of the Internet of Things would be Smart Homes, Industrial Automation, Smart Cities, where a variety of devices monitor temperature, humidity, motion and other environmental activities using sensors and share this data in a common protocol with other devices and systems that might be able to execute actions based on this data.
As the use of these devices and systems grows the integration and automation will bring new conveniences to humans and better management of systems.
How do we build apps for the IoT?
As a software developer, the main areas of development would be the analytics and end-user level (see How to develop Applications for the Internet of Things). Data received from the edge devices would be collected and stored for processing and analysis. Apps would be developed to process this data and extract valuable information to trigger actions on other devices or to provide dashboards and digested information for humans to view and act upon.
Challenges to the IoT?
The biggest challenge to the Internet of Things are the same that have affected a series prior technology advancement, namely:
As with previous technologies a variety of protocols are vying to become the standard for communication among the devices which form the IoT. Devices would need to include multiple radios to communicate via Bluetooth, WiFi, Zigbee and other near- and far-communication protocols
Devices would need to securely share data to avoid misuse of the information
With the growing number of devices and the growth in volume of data generated from these devices, storing the data for analysis will become a challenge. Cloud storage is the preferred method where data can be stored without having constantly add new hardware to scale up the storage
Powering the devices on the Internet of Things and keeping them running in optimal condition would require reliable and cheap sources of energy
The future for the Internet of Things seems very bright given the huge amount of investment and interest. In addition, existing initiatives such as M2M communication for logistics, healthcare, security will continue to push the boundaries to create a more autonomous environment where data is collected, processed and used for execution of processes seamlessly with as little human intervention as possible to provide added convenience and comfort to all.
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