Technology trends affecting IoT

Every technology is affected greatly by different trends. Today we shall examine the different trends in different areas that will directly have an effect on the Internet of Things(IoT) technology.

General science and Technology

Technological and scientific advances and breakthroughs are occurring across a number of disciplines at an increasing pace. Below is a brief description of the science and technology advances that have a direct rele-vance to IoT

Material Science

This science has a large impact across a vast range of industries, from pharmaceutical and cosmetics to electronics. MicroElectroMechanical Systems (MEMS) can be used to build advanced micro-sized sensors like accelerometers and gyroscopes. Emerging flexible and printable electronics will enable a new range of innovations for embedding technology in the real

world. New materials provide different methods to develop and manufacture a large range of different sensors and actuators, as well as being used in applica- tions for environmental control, water purification Additionally, we will see other innovative uses such as smart textiles that will provide the capability to produce the next generation of wearable technologies.

Complex and Advanced Machinery

These are the tools that are autonomous or semi-autonomous. These are found in a number of different industries such as, robots and very advanced machinery is used in different harsh environments, such as deep-sea exploration, or in the mining industry . Advanced machines have many modalities, and operate with a combination of local autonomous capabilities as well as remote control. Sensing and actuation are key technologies, and local monitor-control loops for routine tasks are required in addition to reliable communications for remote operations. Often such solutions require real-time characteristics. These systems will continue to evolve and automate tasks today performed by humans.

Energy Production and Storage

This is relevant to IoT for two reasons. Firstly, it relates to the global interest of securing the availability of electricity while reducing climate and environmental impacts. Smart Grids, for example, imply micro-generation of electricity using affordable photovoltaic panels. In addition, smart grids also require new types of energy storage, both for the grid itself and for emerging technologies such as Electric Vehicles (EVs) that rely on increasingly efficient battery technologies. Secondly, powering embedded devices in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) will increasingly rely on different energy harvesting technologies and also rely on new miniaturized battery technologies and ultra capacitors. As these technologies improve, IoT will be applicable in a broad range of scenarios that need long battery life.

Trends in ICT

Today, sensors, actuators, and tags function as the digital interfaces to the physical world. Small-scale and cheap sensors and actuators provide a bridge between the physical realm and ICT systems. Tags using technologies such as RFID provide the means to put electronic identities on any object, and can be cheaply produced.

Embedded processing is evolving, not only towards higher capabilities and processing speeds, but also extending towards the smallest of applications. There is a growing market for small-scale embedded processing such as 8-, 16-, and 32-bit microcontrollers with on-chip RAM and flash memory, I/O capabilities, and networking interfaces that are integrated on tiny System-on-a-Chip (SoC) solutions. These enable very constrained devices with a small footprint of a few mm 2 and very low power consumption (in the milli- to micro-Watt range), yet are still capable of hosting an entire TCP/IP stack including a small web server.

Instant access to the Internet is available virtually everywhere today, mainly thanks to wireless and cellular technologies and the rapid deployment of cellular 3G and 4G or Long Term Evolution (LTE) systems on a global scale. These systems provide ubiquitous and relatively cheap connectivity with the right characteristics for many applications, including low latency and the capacity to handle large amounts of data with high reliability. Bluetooth Low Energy, and

Power Line Communication (PLC) solutions to reach even the most cost sensitive deployments and tiniest devices.

Software architectures have undergone several evolutions over the past decades, in particular with the increasing dominance of the web paradigm. Open APIs provide a simple mechanism for developers to access the functionality of the platform in question. Over time, these platforms, due to the increasing use and power of the Internet, have become open platforms ones that do not depend on certain programming languages or lock-in between platform developers and platform owners.

Software development has started applying the web paradigm and using a service-oriented approach (SOA). By extending the web paradigm to IoT devices, they can become a natural component of building any application and facilitate an easy integration of IoT device services

into any enterprise system that is based on the SOA (e.g. that uses web services or RESTful interfaces). IoT applications can then become technology and programming language independent. This will help boost the IoT application development market. A key component in establishing the application development market is Open APIs.

Open APIs, in the same way that they have been critical to the development of the web, will be just as important to the creation of a successful IoT market, and we can already see developments in this space. Put simply, Open APIs relate to a common need to create a market between many companies, as is the case in the IoT market. Open APIs permit the creation of a fluid industrial platform, allowing components to be combined together in multiple different ways by multiple developers with little to no interaction with those who developed the platform, or installed the devices.

Without Open APIs, a developer would need to create contracts with several different companies in order to get access to the correct data to develop the application. The transaction costs associated with establishing such a service would be prohibitively expensive for most small development companies; they would need to establish contracts with each company for the data required, and spend time and money on legal fees and business development with each individual company.

virtualization has many different facets and has gained a lot of attention in the past few years, even though it has been around for a rather long time. The cloud computing paradigm, with different as a Service models, is one of the greatest aspects of the evolution of ICT for IoT as it allows virtualized and independent execution environments for multiple applications to reside in isolation on the same hardware platform, and usually in large data centers.

Closely related to the topic of data centers, data processing and intelligent software will have an increasing role to play in IoT solutions. A popular concept now is big data, which refers to the increasing number and size of data sets that are available for companies and individuals to collect and perform analysis on. Built on large-scale computing, data storage, in-memory processing, and analytics, big data is intended to find insights in the massive data sets produced. Naturally, these technologies are therefore key enablers for IoT, as they allow the collation and aggrega- tion of the massive datasets that devices and sensors are likely to produce.

conclusion

the IoT market holds incredible promise for solving big problems for industry, society, and even individuals. One key thing to note, however, is the tremendous complexity that such systems need to handle in order to function efficiently and effectively. Partnerships and alliances are therefore critical no one company will be able to produce all the technology and software required to deliver IoT solutions. Moreover, no one company will be able to house the innovative

capacity required to develop new solutions for this market. IoT solutions bring together devices, networks, applications, software platforms, cloud computing platforms, business processing systems, knowledge management, visualization, and advanced data analysis techniques. This is quite simply not possible at scale without significant levels of system integration and standards development.