What is IoT? - The Role of IoT and Applications of IoT | IoT Devices | Internet of Things

This article is based on the recently emerged technology known as IoT and its applications and how they will affect our world in future.

What is IoT?

IoT stands for the “Internet of Things", and it comprises of all the hardware devices, and sensors which aims to or have the ability to connect to the internet and they can automatically or manually send and receive the information (or we can say it has data synchronization features). 

IoT is one of the most recently emerging technology which supports Industry 4.0 objectives and in industry most of the products are made keeping in mind about the customer interactive. Some devices that we use in our daily life like refrigerators, washing machines, etc. such machines are tending toward becoming more and more interactive day by day. 

As we can see in case of washing machines people need to manually operate the machine at each stage and so is in the refrigerators but nowadays, they are getting more and more interactive as washing machines just take some input and finally send notification to the owner’s phone via SMS and automatically turns off and similarly in fridges the ability to automatically fix the inside temperature by sensing the environment temperature.

There are sensors in this IoT which makes them special and for this we can use any of IoT kit or packages to develop manual device according to our needs. There are IoT kits available in market, you can see in the image below.

These IoT kits are the complete package of sensors (photodiode, resistors, temperature sensors, capacitors, etc.), microprocessor (with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth integrated), wires and many other electronic components.

However, costs may vary on what is the quality and what’s inside the package and due to brand also. You can also buy the separate sensors and start developing like there are PLC’s, Arduino, raspberry devices of which you can make use of.

The biggest challenge of IoT were:

- Low capacity and low storage devices

- Low data transmission

These all problems have been solved by researchers as they found the new protocol named MQTT (Message Query Telemetry Transport) which is capable of handling low packet data and sends it carefully to the cloud.

And on the other hand, small devices require low computational power so custom PLC’s are used and now they are capable in sending the processed sensor collected data to the cloud (having high computation ability) for processing and then cloud servers serve with the processed data to the IoT devices which sound good.

Most important thing here is data collected by sensors which are sent for the processing to cloud and in response the device gets the preprocessed data for output. This data needs to be transferred securely to cloud, loosing packets may affect the results of the processed data. 

These data types may vary from device to device and the purpose for which it is made, like in case of temperature sensors they send the temperature and in response they get text data or maybe image data in case we want to show infrared maps, also if we try to create a device like to check the water level in the water tank, then the input may be in form of visual signal to the photo diode and then in response the device return the simple Boolean values to take the actions like ringing the bell or sending SMS to the owner.

Also in case user create the object detection device then the input are images and the post-processed output is also images.

But the question is, do all the devices need to use cloud power? The answer is no, not every time devices require cloud power. Only in some advanced computations the cloud data are required in case of use wish to apply some complex algorithm, machine learning models, object detection, etc.

At last, we can say that after the IoT came, the numbers of devices increased a lot due to which number of unique IP assigned to separate devices get short and so here comes the application of the IPv6 protocols and they offer very large number of protocols to be assigned to the devices.

Conclusion

IoT devices are in demand as they introduce interactivity to the industry and there are a lot of research options as there are custom hardware available and we can create any device that we want to create.

And, after this IoT came to industry, it started tending toward automation which will for sure change the way the we live in future.