What is IOT - Internet of things ?

 The Internet of Things is actually a pretty simple concept, it means taking all the things in the world and connecting them to the internet.  

The Internet of Things (IoT) describes the network of physical objects—“things”—that are embedded with sensors, software, and other technologies for the purpose of connecting and exchanging data with other devices and systems over the internet. These devices range from ordinary household objects to sophisticated industrial tools. With more than 7 billion connected IoT devices today, experts are expecting this number to grow to 10 billion by 2020 and 22 billion by 2025. Oracle has a network of device partners.       

History of IOT

 It has long been practice for people to place devices (things), gather information, and send signals from one point to another. In previous war times, when enemies would approach a kingdom, people on watch would set off a series of signals via flames or sounds to communicate with the decision makers that a threat was on the horizon.

Over time, institutions have used sensors, or small devices, but the technology that allowed the sensors to report back to a central service was through something like walking, fires, radio signals, cables, or, possibly, satellite. Now, the internet is the primary service on which all these sensors are able to communicate information back to its host.

The internet is abundant and easy to usie. With a framework like this, it does not take as many resources to place a data-collecting device somewhere in the world and retrieve information from it. Signaling devices can grow in variety, beyond their mostly utilitarian purposes, and provide signals for many different use cases.

For example, weather alert systems are now very sophisticated. They monitor a region’s natural disasters, warning of oncoming earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods. After Colorado’s Big Thompson Flood, in 1976, a series of signals were installed to monitor the river elevations and communicate to the people living nearby when the river was dangerous. Similarly, most large United States cities now have sensors to signal to authorities when and where a gun was fired.

Today, we enter an era of small devices connected through the internet. The society known as the Internet of Things can grow rich as it moves into an era of pleasure and delight. Now, rather than having to walk to the rain gauge or answer the door in person or through an intercom, the rain gauge and the doorbell can be connected to the internet and send signals to a person’s phone

How an IOT system works ?

 

• The basic elements of the IoT are devices that gather data. An IoT system consists of sensors/devices which “talk” to the cloud through some kind of connectivity. Broadly speaking, they are internet-connected devices, so they each have an IP address. They range in complexity from autonomous vehicles that haul products around factory floors to simple sensors that monitor the temperature in buildings. They also include personal devices like fitness trackers that monitor the number of steps individuals take each day. To make that data useful it needs to be collected, processed, filtered and analyzed, each of which can be handled in a variety of ways.
• Collecting the data is done by transmitting it from the devices to a gathering point. Moving the data can be done wirelessly using a range of technologies or on wired networks. The data can be sent over the internet to a data center or a cloud that has storage and compute power or the transfer can be staged, with intermediary devices aggregating the data before sending it along.Once the data gets to the cloud, software processes it and then might decide to perform an action, such as sending an alert or automatically adjusting the sensors/devices without the need for the user.
• Processing the data can take place in data centers or cloud, but sometimes that’s not an option. In the case of critical devices such as shutoffs in industrial settings, the delay of sending data from the device to a remote data center is too great. The round-trip time for sending data, processing it, analyzing it and returning instructions (close that valve before the pipes burst) can take too long. In such cases edge-computing can come into play, where a smart edge device can aggregate data, analyze it and fashion responses if necessary, all within relatively close physical distance, thereby reducing delay. Edge devices also have upstream connectivity for sending data to be further processed and stored.