What is Internet of Things (IoT)
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a system of interrelated computing
devices, mechanical and digital machines, objects, animals or people
that are provided with
unique identifiers and the ability to transfer data over a network without requiring human-to-human or human-to-computer interaction.
A
thing, in the Internet of Things, can be a person with a heart monitor implant, a farm animal with a
biochip transponder, an automobile that has built-in
sensors to alert the driver when tire pressure is low -- or any other natural or man-made object that can be assigned an
IP address and provided with the ability to transfer data over a network.
IoT has evolved from the convergence of
wireless technologies, micro-electromechanical systems (
MEMS),
microservices
and the Internet. The convergence has helped tear down the silo walls
between operational technology (OT) and information technology (
IT), allowing unstructured
machine-generated data to be analyzed for insights that will drive improvements.
Kevin Ashton, cofounder and executive director of the Auto-ID Center
at MIT, first mentioned the Internet of Things in a presentation he made
to Procter & Gamble in 1999. Here’s how Ashton explains the
potential of the Internet of Things:
“Today computers -- and, therefore, the
Internet -- are almost wholly dependent on human beings for information.
Nearly all of the roughly 50
petabytes (a petabyte is 1,024
terabytes)
of data available on the Internet were first captured and created by
human beings by typing, pressing a record button, taking a digital
picture or scanning a bar code.
The problem is, people have limited
time, attention and accuracy -- all of which means they are not very
good at capturing data about things in the real world. If we had
computers that knew everything there was to know about things -- using
data they gathered without any help from us -- we would be able to track
and count everything and greatly reduce waste, loss and cost. We would
know when things needed replacing, repairing or recalling and whether
they were fresh or past their best.”
IPv6’s huge
increase in address space is an important factor in the development of
the Internet of Things. According to Steve Leibson, who identifies
himself as “occasional docent at the Computer History Museum,” the
address space expansion means that we could “assign an IPV6 address to
every atom on the surface of the earth, and still have enough addresses
left to do another 100+ earths.” In other words, humans could easily
assign an IP address to every "thing" on the planet. An increase in the
number of smart nodes, as well as the amount of upstream data the nodes
generate, is expected to raise new concerns about data privacy, data sovereignty and security.
Although the concept wasn't named until 1999, the Internet of Things has been in development for decades. The first
Internet appliance,
for example, was a Coke machine at Carnegie Melon University in the
early 1980s. The programmers could connect to the machine over the
Internet, check the status of the machine and determine whether or not
there would be a cold drink awaiting them, should they decide to make
the trip down to the machine.
A Basic Architecture of IoT
