Courtesy : intuz.com

Iot development

The Internet of Things (IoT) has been continuously getting popular by companies like Bosch, ARM, Cisco, GE and Intel. The marketing campaigns of all of these companies speak a lot for their massive business opportunities with the IoT offers. IoT is undoubtedly becoming a popular label as compare to machine-to-machine (M2M). If it’s about IoT Application Development Services then companies are adopting this strategy at a much faster rate.

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Internet of Things has become a distant future and is growing at an undefined rate. If we talk about figures then in 2017 the connected devices overtook the world’s population of7 billion. It is going to reach 20.4 billion by 2020. This makes the IoT market worth $157 billion in 2016 to $457 billion in less than 15 years.

IoT (Internet of Things) allows to get connected with things to the Internet. These things have the power to exchange information between them and transmit data to other devices and systems. Also, they can receive data as well. Machines and smart devices also have the capability to share information regarding their internal state. Using the Internet, people can connect to the digital network and devices like computers and smartphones for sharing information, chat and more.

• IoT ranges from consumer-oriented devices to connected equipment in the enterprise and also in industrial assets like robots, machines, and workers in smart factory.
• IoT is imperative for doing customer-fling innovation, digital transformation, data-driven optimization and automation and new business models and revenue streams in all the sectors.
• IoT act as an umbrella for a wide range of technologies and services that depend on use cases and are a part of the big technology ecosystem that covers technologies like cloud computing, big data, artificial intelligence, blockchain, augmented and virtual reality and more such.
• IoT is making wonders in several industries and companies by levering its power and delivering some great real-time IoT examples.
• The use of the Internet of Things is happening at diverse speeds as IoT is investing in the manufacturing industry is higher than any other industry.

For IoT product design and development, it has been said that designing and development of IoT products is the future. For this cause, IoT systems combine physical as well as digital components which collect data from physical devices and opt for delivering actionable and operational insights.

IoT Development Stack and its Requirements

IoT development stack has 5 layers in this architecture for creating a full-fledged IoT solution.

IoT Development Stack and its Requirements

Device Hardware

Device Hardware is the first layer of IoT technology stack that defines the digital and physical parts of any smart connected product. Here the question arises – how it will look like or of what material will it be made of?

In this stacked layer, it is imperative to know the implications of size, deployment, cost, useful lifetime, reliability and more such. If we talk about small devices like for example, smartwatches then you may have only one room for such a System on a Chip (SoC). Here, you will be needing embedded computer like Raspberry-Pi, Artik module, and BeagleBone board.

Device Software

This layer requires to carefully find out the sensors by having access to the required data. Sensor will assist us to gather data that we want so that the smart connected product will perform the way it is decided.

Device software has the capability to turn out the device hardware into a smart device. This IoT technology stack enables the software-defined hardware and then any hardware device can serve various applications depending on the running embedded software.

The device software layer can be distributed into two categories i.e. Operating system and Applications.

Operating system

The whole complexity of your IoT solution will portray the type of operating system you are in the need of. There are some top things that you must include like when your app requires a real-time operating system, I/O support, and support for the full TCP/IP stack.

Some examples of an embedded OS are –

• Brillo
• Linux
• Windows Embedded
• VxWorks and more …

OS applications

This app runs on top of the operating system and offers specific functionality for your IoT solution. It consists of endless possibilities. Here, you can pay attention to data acquisition, analytics, local control and streaming to the cloud and more.

OS applications

Connectivity

In the connectivity part of the IoT technology stack, it is important to define the network communication platforms that will be getting connected to the sensors on the product hardware to the cloud and then to the application.

The several types of connectivity which are used in general includes, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, Radio, Cellular, and Satellite.

The communication part at this stage refers to all the diverse ways where your device will be exchanging information with the whole world. This will include physical networks and the type of protocols that you will be using. It is truly said that the communication mechanisms are connected to the hardware of the device software.

Some of the Communication Protocols are –

• Infrastructure (ex: 6LowPAN, IPv4/IPv6, RPL)
• Identification (ex: EPC, uCode, IPv6, URIs)
• Comms / Transport (ex: Wifi, Bluetooth, LPWAN)
• Discovery (ex: Physical Web, mDNS, DNS-SD)
• Data Protocols (ex: MQTT, CoAP, AMQP, Websocket, Node)
• Device Management (ex: TR-069, OMA-DM)
• Semantic (ex: JSON-LD, Web Thing Model)
• Multi-layer Frameworks (ex: Alljoyn, IoTivity, Weave, Homekit)