Something about the Internet of things
In 1999 Kevin Ashton proposed the concept of “on the internet of things” in the MIT Auto-Id Center. It is a term that refers to a digital interconnection that exists between everyday objects with the internet. Simply put, it is that connection that exists between the internet and objects rather than with people.
What is sought with the IoT is to enhance the objects that were formerly connected by a closed circuit, and also allows them to communicate globally through the use of the network of networks? IoT depends on a comprehensive series of technology such as application programming interfaces (APIs) that connect devices to the internet. Other Internet technologies of things that are key are Big Data management tools, predictive analytics, machine learning, cloud, and radio frequency identification (RFID). Within a few years, the next generation of internet applications will be able to identify all objects; This will be a system capable of instantly identifying any object through code.
Today, there is a global company called Cisco Systems founded in 1984 by Leonard Bosack and Sandra Lerner (husbands), who were part of the computer staff at Stanford University. This company is dedicated to the manufacture, sale, maintenance and consulting of telecommunications equipment.
Cisco Systems is the initiative of the internet of things, and for that, it has created a dynamic “connection counter” that allows giving an estimated number of “things” that are connected from July 2013 to 2020. The field most studied by the “Internet of things” is the connection of devices to the network through low power radio signals; That is why this type of signals does not need Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, but the energy expenditure is high, so different alternatives that need less energy and are cheaper are being investigated.
There are different types of applications for devices connected to the Internet, so separate categories have been suggested in three main branches of use: consumers, business and infrastructure. Some examples are consumer applications such as connected cars, entertainment, washing machines, etc. that are connected through the Wi-Fi network for remote process monitoring. Another example is the media who use the internet of things primarily for marketing activities and study consumer habits, thus collecting useful information about millions of individuals through behavior segmentation. There are many fields of application of the internet of things, here are some examples: infrastructure management, agriculture, medicine and health, transportation, industry.
According to Silvia Watts, author and digital creative, the internet of things generates a great social and economic impact among the information-consuming society, so that access to user information can involve social control and political manipulation. Thanks to the arrival of super-cheap computer chips and the ubiquity of wireless networks, it’s possible to turn anything, from something as small as a pill to something as big as an airplane, into a part of the IoT. Connecting up all these different objects and adding sensors to them adds a level of digital intelligence to devices that would be otherwise dumb, enabling them to communicate real-time data without involving a human being. The Internet of Things is making the fabric of the world around us more smarter and more responsive, merging the digital and physical universes. A lightbulb that can be switched on using a smartphone app is an IoT device, as is a motion sensor or a smart thermostat in your office or a connected streetlight. An IoT device could be as fluffy as a child’s toy or as serious as a driverless truck. Some larger objects may themselves be filled with many smaller IoT components, such as a jet engine that’s now filled with thousands of sensors collecting and transmitting data back to make sure it is operating efficiently. At an even bigger scale, smart cities projects are filling entire regions with sensors to help us understand and control the environment.
Big and getting bigger — there are already more connected things than people in the world. If we want everyone to benefit from the potential of devices connected to the Internet, we must ensure that they are safe and reliable. You can join the world and defend a safer connected world. Tech analyst company IDC predicts that in total there will be 41.6 billion connected IoT devices by 2025, or “things.” It also suggests industrial and automotive equipment represent the largest opportunity of connected “things,”, but it also sees the strong adoption of smart home and wearable devices in the near term.
Another tech analyst, Gartner, predicts that the enterprise and automotive sectors will account for 5.8 billion devices this year, up almost a quarter in 2019. Utilities will be the highest user of IoT, thanks to the continuing rollout of smart meters. Security devices, in the form of intruder detection and web cameras, will be the second biggest use of IoT devices. Building automation — like connected lighting — will be the fastest-growing sector, followed by automotive (connected cars) and healthcare (monitoring of chronic conditions).
The benefits of the IoT for business depend on the particular implementation; agility and efficiency are usually top considerations. The idea is that enterprises should have access to more data about their products and their internal systems, and a greater ability to make changes as a result.
US intelligence community briefings have warned that the country’s adversaries already can threaten its critical infrastructure as well “as the broader ecosystem of connected consumer and industrial devices known as the Internet of Things”. US intelligence has also warned that connected thermostats, cameras, and cookers could all be used either to spy on citizens of another country or to cause havoc if they were hacked. Adding key elements of national critical infrastructure (like dams, bridges, and elements of the electricity grid) to the IoT makes it even more vital that security is as tight as possible.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a network of physical objects capable of gathering and sharing electronic information.
If as we said, it will be the processors will be in charge of the management of the information, it must be issued from somewhere: the sensors, the ones in charge of capturing the information and interacting between the technology and the environment.
The Internet of Things includes a wide variety of “smart” devices, from industrial machines that transmit data about the production process to sensors that track information about the human body.
The IoT generates vast amounts of data: from sensors attached to machine parts or environment sensors, or the words we shout at our smart speakers. That means the IoT is a significant driver of big-data analytics projects because it allows companies to create vast data sets and analyze them. Giving a manufacturer vast amounts of data about how its components behave in real-world situations can help them to make improvements much more rapidly, while data culled from sensors around a city could help planners make traffic flow more efficiently.
That data will come in many different forms — voice requests, video, temperature or other sensor readings, all of which can be mined for insight. As analyst IDC notes, the IoT metadata category is a growing source of data to be managed and leveraged. “Metadata is a prime candidate to be fed into NoSQL databases like MongoDB to bring structure to unstructured content or fed into cognitive systems to bring new levels of understanding, intelligence, and order to outwardly random environments,” it said.
The Internet of things has arrived and will bring incredible opportunities in the next five years. And although smart things already exist everywhere, the IoT industry has a long way to go in terms of overall security. Many of the current IoT devices are not yet designed for security and privacy, the phenomenon we can call: “design insecurity.”
In particular, the IoT will deliver large amounts of real-time data. Cisco calculates that machine-to-machine connections that support IoT applications will account for more than half of the total 27.1 billion devices and connections, and will account for 5% of global IP traffic by 2021.
The IPv6 protocol — which since 2016 is beginning to be implemented in all electronic devices with the Internet and which considerably improves the number of host connections concerning IPv4 — and the RFID (Radio-frequency identification, radio frequency identification) system are also two of the innovations that will allow progress in IoT.
