Key Technological Challenges for IoT
Internet of Things (IoT) has been recognized as an essential part of our future lives. For so many proposed ‘digital age’ concepts yet fully realized, for example, smart cities, smart homes and intelligent factories, IoT applications are crucial for their development. However, for this interconnected network of devices to become economically feasible, scientists and engineers still have a long way to go. Several technological challenges that IoT developers and potential users currently face can be summarized below.
Power
The single largest technological barrier for IoT development and commercialization is power consumption. Ideally, IoT devices should be able to work on their own for a long period of time, as a large portion of them will be deployed at locations that are difficult or impossible to access. Thus, the battery (or any other types of energy supply mechanisms) performance is vital for IoT technologies to become practical. Energy harvesting, such as using solar power, is promising in some regions for certain types of IoT applications, but not all of them.
Security
The security concern for large scale of IoT deployment is also paramount. This has been discussed in one of my previous posts.
Sensing
The ultimate goal of IoT is to gain insights from our world by gathering additional information that may not be possible to obtain before. At least two challenges can be identified here:
- How to let each sensor decide what is useful information, and how to extract it out of a huge volume of sensor data.
- How to accommodate the heterogeneous nature of the applications. For example, a manufacturing company may want to use IoT-related technologies to increase its operation efficiency for its multiple manufacturing sites with different types (and ages) of manufacturing equipment (which, in turn, create different types of workflows). It is difficult and time-consuming to figure out ways to get a consistent set of data to analyze across all these different devices.
Connectivity
The connectivity challenge of IoT can also be dis-aggregate into two parts:
- Unification of connectivity standards. There are more than a dozen types of wired and wireless connectivity standards today, each serving for a useful purpose. To enable data gathered and transmitted from various standards is challenging.
- Integration of multiple cloud services. Given the high volume nature of sensor data, cloud seems to be a cost-effective option for data storage and analysis. However, there is a wide variety and diverse number of cloud providers, and there are no standards for how devices connect and are managed on the cloud.
Sources:
