Planning and practice of COT intelligent iot system from 2020 to 2021

Published in

COT-ChainsOfThings

8 min readMar 30, 2020

At the beginning of the year in 2020, a new epidemic has swept the world, affecting people’s life, work, social economy and the operation of various industries. During the prevention and control of the epidemic, people have seen the application value and market potential of innovative technologies such as Internet of things, artificial intelligence and blockchain again. Under the strict control of Spring Festival holidays and epidemic prevention measures, the promotion of various entity businesses of the team has also been affected.

Since the inception of the project nearly two years ago, COT team has put forward the system planning and product objectives of the second stage of convertibility technology after the research and exploration of the first-stage Internet of things and the block chain fusion technology.

The following are five parts: product objectives, fusion system design, business practices, follow-up business planning, and community topics.

Product Objectives

The core value of intelligent Internet of things is to realize the cost saving of human resources, basic elements and environment through Internet of things technology. Centering on the three scenarios of “big industry, big business and big life”, the company insists on taking the service entity business as the project focus and actively seeks for industrial breakthrough. Through the successful application of the Internet of things in “smart city, smart transportation, industrial production, agricultural production, environmental protection and energy conservation, sports and fitness, product anti-counterfeiting”, it provides necessary tools and solutions for the entity demanders from the aspects of reducing cost, enhancing value, improving satisfaction and reducing customer cost.

The goal of COT products is to provide a landing and extensible technical service platform for Internet of things applications, as well as a deliverable customer solution based on the technical service platform.

The goal of COT technology service platform is to integrate all kinds of key service capabilities, such as terminal equipment, network protocol, data communication, cloud service, blockchain, machine learning algorithm, and form a service platform driven by messages, connected with services and open interface.

Explore and build a friendly link based on AI computing power and intelligent IoT, and a real availability product scheme based on the block chain POW + dpos mechanism. Expand the research on the integration of blockchain and 5G protocol layer.

Fusion System Design

COT product solution system is divided into equipment end, server end, client end and data end. The bottom part can be supported by the secure data delivery framework based on block chain technology.

Equipment End

Function：

Complete intelligent Internet of things device access, protocol conversion, data communication and other functions.

Logical structure：

Part：

Edge nodes: various independent devices and units of work.

NFC: near field communication network, including wired and wireless communication.

Gateway: protocol converter, the device responsible for near-field communication protocol and server-side communication.

Wan: a network of connections to the public Internet.

Non — directly connected devices: non — directly connected devices connect to the gateway through near — field LAN.

Direct connection equipment: direct connection equipment, gateway direct access to wan. Such as Shared bikes connected to the cloud over a wide area network (WAN).

Server side business processing: the server side installed on the cloud communicates through the protocol, receives data and performs business logic function processing。

Instruction issue: an operation that requires instruction control of a device, and sends instructions through the server to a directly connected device or gateway.

Access protocol：

There are many Internet of things access protocols, and MQTT has gradually become the standard protocol of the Internet of things. In many cases, CoAP or Socket protocols are needed to adapt to the computing power of the device due to the insufficient MCU.

MQTT

CoAP

TCP/UDP

WebSocket

Server end

Function：

Complete communication with the device side, data interaction with the data side, response to client requests, business logic function realization.

Logical structure：

Access service: responsible for communication with the device side, complete data reception, protocol adaptation, load balancing and other functions.

Web services: responsible for communicating with the client to complete the response interaction of the client Web request.

Data processing services: responsible for reading and writing, management, calculation and other functions with the data side.

Business processing service: completes the implementation of business logic processing at the application function level.

Service management service: complete the rule resolution, coordination, scheduling and other functions of the service.

Client end

Function：

Customers access the Internet of things system through mobile phones, tablets, PCS, and front-end applications for customer interaction.

Logical structure：

Process：

Clients visit Web sites or apps through PC or mobile terminals;

The front-end application sends the service request to the server through the Http protocol.

After the service processing unit of the server completes the request receiving, data loading and logical calculation, the result is returned to the front-end application.

After the front-end application receives the reply, the visual result will be displayed to the customer through the App and browser.

Data end

Function：

The data end completes the data storage management and the computation.

Logical structure：

Block chain: distributed ledger, decentralized security and credit management solutions;

Cache database: improves data access performance by keeping hot data in memory. Because the Internet of things is a lot of real-time systems, high performance requirements;

Relational database: storage and management of structured data；

NoSQL database: storage and management of semi-structured data;

Streaming data: real-time big data processing and calculation. To meet the high real-time processing requirements of the system;

Distributed file system: distributed storage and management of files;

Inverted index: search engine, real-time search query.

Secure data delivery framework

The Internet of things is longer than the traditional Internet and more vulnerable to attacks, so it is necessary to strengthen the security of the Internet of things from multiple levels, including network, system, data, credit and other levels.

The network layer：

Transport layer security (SSL/TLS for two-way authentication)

SSH remote management

The system level：

Device control permission, password, account security

Web framework and container, API security

Anti-xss (cross-site scripting) strategy

Anti-csrf (cross-site forgery request) policy

Data level：

Data cache and persistence layer security (against technical framework vulnerability, against SQL injection)

Credit level

User authentication and authorization (block chain)

User credit and privacy protection (block chain)

User ledger and payment (block chain)

Business practice

At the beginning of the year, we have connected with many departments of State Grid Power in the fields of new infrastructure construction, ultra-high voltage and so on, based on the application demand of aiot technology upgrading, made it clear that the strategic direction is to serve the construction of “international leading energy Internet enterprise”, and gave full play to the technical advantages and practical experience of COT in the process of promoting power grid to energy interconnection, sharing and mutual aid.

Based on the original ubiquitous Internet of things system, COT improves information integration and integrates blockchain data interaction. From the Internet of things data security, multiple communication, edge computing, intelligent cloud, power management and other aspects of the design of integration scheme. At present, the scheme design has been in the stage of improvement and revision, and the relevant test DEMO has been completed.

Follow-up business planning

In the case of satisfying the old business, it focuses on the business scenario based on energy and edge computing, constructs the local communication connection technology and the coupling business of 5G protocol layer, and implements it through the security data delivery framework combining with the block chain technology as the expandable point. Focus on automation engineering and information engineering business of pain point transformation business.

1. Pay attention to ubiquitous Internet of things technology infrastructure, and implement the landing scenarios of power infrastructure such as tower, manhole cover, branch box and ground box;

2. Opportunities for traditional business transformation and optimization of new infrastructure;

3. New retail smart hardware with mining machine system solutions that can apply artificial intelligence and the Internet of things for computing power acceleration.

Community topics

COT, as an industry practitioner of the integration of block chain technology with the Internet of things, not only serves the entity business well, but also actively organizes team members to study and discuss relevant knowledge, draws on the successful experience of the industry, and accumulates knowledge reserve for improving the competitiveness of the project. This is also one of the reasons why we advocate the construction of COT technology ecological community. The following is part of the learning content sharing, welcome to the community partners to participate in the discussion.

Enlightenment and significance of “avalanche diode” to governance model design.

Avalanche diode is one of the most basic electronic components. The “avalanche” characteristic is that when the reverse voltage reaches a certain value, it will trigger the reverse conduction (P: it feels exactly the opposite of the stock circuit breaker). In all kinds of complex Internet of things applications, how to release and balance the over-concentrated rights and risks in time is our thinking of building a weakly centralized block chain system of Internet of things by using avalanche diode ideas and Nash equilibrium.

Outbreak brings development opportunities for Internet technology.

During the epidemic period, the whole population will go out less to reduce the population contact, from online consumption, work, study to various self-service services, to telemedicine, intelligent equipment use. This has greatly increased the scale of Internet economy and provided a golden opportunity for the development of 5G, AIOT, cloud and other technologies. People’s social, living, consuming and working habits will continue and develop after the epidemic period. More and more Internet technologies, Internet of things technologies and AI technologies will bring more and more data, and the data needs to be credible, verifiable, and value interactive, which is exactly the scope of the blockchain technology. At the end of the battle against the global epidemic, the credible blockchain “health certificate” may accelerate the recovery of the global industry and provide a strong guarantee for the “resumption of work and production”.