The Internet of Things: Understanding its Structure and Potential Applications

At its core, the Internet of Things (IoT) is composed of small devices that monitor various aspects of our environment, such as temperature, humidity, and motion. These devices transmit their collected data to another more complex device, which can be a smartphone, a control unit like a smart thermostat, or a dedicated gateway. The latter category of device is known as an IoT Gateway, and it plays a crucial role in facilitating communication between sensors and the cloud.

IoT Gateways act as intermediaries between the sensors and the internet, often using low-power connectivity protocols such as Bluetooth or Zigbee. They receive data from sensors, process it, and then transmit it further up to the cloud. This is where part of ARM's strategy comes into play, with their Embed OS device server handling connections from IoT devices and using open-source protocols like HTTP for data communication and device management.

In a typical IoT setup, an IoT Gateway is connected to the internet and serves as a bridge between the sensor and the cloud. The Gateway receives data from the sensor, processes it, and then sends it up to the cloud, where it can be accessed and analyzed by humans. This allows for remote monitoring and control of devices, such as air conditioning units or traffic lights.

Imagine you want to adjust the temperature in your house. Your air conditioning unit is equipped with sensors that monitor the temperature and send data back to the cloud via an IoT Gateway. You can then access this data through a web interface or mobile app, allowing you to control the temperature from anywhere. Similarly, you might want to switch on the air conditioner earlier if you're expecting to arrive home early.

Other potential applications of IoT include traffic management, street lighting, and even garbage collection. With the widespread adoption of IoT, businesses can optimize their operations, reduce costs, and improve efficiency. For example, a smart city might use IoT sensors to monitor waste levels, predicting when collections are needed and optimizing routes for garbage trucks.

However, with the benefits of IoT come potential risks. As more devices become connected to the internet, the likelihood of security breaches increases. A recent report from Intel's McAfee Lab singled out IoT as a potential area for security threats, citing the predicted fast growth of connected devices with poor levels of security.

In 2013, a security conference demonstrated that it was possible to hack into webcams connected to the internet, allowing hackers to watch what was happening inside them. In some cases, attackers even used these hacked webcams to watch and interact with babies in their rooms. Such incidents have sparked concerns about the potential for IoT devices to be compromised.

In addition to these security risks, there is also the issue of M2M (Machine-to-Machine) communication. At its core, M2M refers to the ability of one device to communicate with another device. In the context of IoT, M2M involves how connected devices talk to each other and to the cloud.

One of the unique aspects of M2M in IoT is the low-power usage required by these devices. Many IoT devices have limited processing power, memory, and battery life, making them difficult to manage remotely. However, this also presents opportunities for innovation and cost-effectiveness.

The big money in IoT lies not just in consumer applications but also in larger-scale projects such as smart buildings, cities, and businesses. The initial investment required for these projects can be high, but the long-term benefits can be substantial. For instance, a company might reduce energy consumption by optimizing its lighting systems or waste management processes.

As the IoT revolution gains momentum, it will be interesting to see how technology advances over the next few years. With seamless IoT experiences becoming increasingly important, businesses and innovators are likely to invest heavily in developing new solutions and services that integrate IoT seamlessly into daily life. Along the way, we can expect surprises from unexpected sources, driving innovation forward and improving our lives.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhello there my name is Gary Sims Android authority and today I'm going to try and answer the question what is the Internet of Things the internet as we know it is going to change today it's a massive Global Network that allows people to communicate with each other we send emails we send instant messages we use websites to communicate to share data and it is the people who drive the internet the data that we send comes from client devices like a laptop or a PC or a tablet or a smartphone and it goes to some servers and the servers then transmit that data that information on further in that sense we can say that the internet is made up of three major actors the people the client devices they use and the servers but a whole new category of actor is being added to the internet they've been unglamorous called things hence the term internet of things so what is a thing we really it's any object that has a sens attached to it that can transmit the data from that sensor further up into the internet into the cloud where it can be analyzed and used to make decisions examples of such sensors include temperature sensors traffic sensors flow rate sensors energy usage monitors and so on a temperature sensor can be placed in a smart thermostat a smart electricity usage meter can be wired into a house or a traffic monitor can be placed into a traffic signal these things then send data further up the chain until either a person or a piece of computer software makes a decision based on that data it won't be long and maybe it's already happened but there will be more things on the internet sending data around than actual people using internet enabled devices the cell phone the internet email social media and smartphones have all changed the way we do things both at a personal level and at a business level clearly the internet of things will do the same thing our personal lives and our professional lives will be affected how they'll be affected isn't fully yet understood but for sure it will change things there are several big challenges ahead for the embryonic internet of things there are technological challenges in terms of the actual devices that collect and send data these challenges include both hardware and software issues like battery life maintenance interoperability and compatibility there are big data issues around Building Systems that can process all this data and use it to achieve meaningful tasks there are also security and privacy problems who wants to have a smart home that can be hacked nobody does or we still a smart hospital that can be breached remotely as we move from the individual Smart Homes to Smart cities which have Smart Transport Systems and smart infrastructure then all these issues become more complex and more difficult to solve correctly the reality of the internet of things from a consumer point of view took a giant leap forward this year when Samsung's co-ceo took took to the stage at CES 2015 to declare that all Samsung products will be Internet of Things enabled within 5 years if 2020 sounds like a long way off to you he also said that 90% of Samsung's products would be able to connect to the web by 2017 Samsung's plans are for every washing machine every air conditioning unit and every microwave oven to be iot enabled and 5 years from now every single piece of Samsung Hardware will be an iot device whether it is an air purifier or an oven in his speech the co-co also highlighted that the iot experience needs to be seamless for the consumer the iot experience has to be shimless I predict that this journey to the seamless experience will be quite bumpy however they're ACC companied like arm who are trying their best to smooth out the road as we go towards the end of 2014 arm announced a new operating system to boost the development of iot devices called embed OS it's a free operating system for arms cortex M range of microcontrollers one of the key points about embed OS is that it supports the important iot protocols and allows anybody from a hobbyist developer to a multi-million dollar Corporation to prototype and develop iot devices embed OS will include all the functionality needed to create create an iot device and to transmit that data to the cloud it supports a lot of different communication Stacks including ipv4 IPv6 six lowan Bluetooth Wi-Fi 2G GSM and 3G the interesting thing about Ed OS is that it falls into a very special class of operating system when we think about a smartphone it comes with an operating system like Android and Android itself is built on Linux and Linux is what we call a multitasking operating system and the resources in a modern day smartphone are quite large you've got a quad core maybe an octacore processor you've got a GPU you've got 1 gigs 2 gigs 3 gigs of RAM maybe 8 gigs of internal storage and so on a typical iot device will have a processor that runs at just 100 MHz not 1.5 GHz or 2 GHz like a smartphone it'll only have maybe 4K of memory or 96k of memory in the biggest case is 256k of memory and that's very different to three gigabyt of memory that we see in a smartphone it only have a tiny bit of storage maybe 32k 64k of flash storage that means that Internet of Things devices need a special type of operating system so I said there were four types of operating system the multitasking operating system is like Android and like Linux there's another type of operating system which is called an OS or a real-time operating system these are found in very small debet devices that you get in cars in Planes in industrial applications and they are Specialist typee of operating system that worries about how the schedu works how things happen in what order they happen where they happen within a certain time constraint now that sounds good for iot but that kind of system can be quite battery hungry or not very power efficient another approach is called the bare metal approach it really isn't an operating system in itself basically you have a loop that goes round round and round and round round for infinity and you run your code inside that Loop checking everything and just doing everything if you've used an Arduino you'll be familiar with that kind of idea the problem is that can't be maintained once the project gets particularly large it also doesn't allow for scheduling it doesn't allow for certain other things as well so it has its limitations and that brings us to the fourth type of operating system which is a low power operating system an operating system that's designed just to conserve power while performing its functions typically these operator systems are event driven rather than using polling always checking to see what's going on and that's the kind of category that the mbed OS fits into and it's very useful for internet of thing devices so what does the internet of things look like in terms of its structure it's quite simple at the thing end you have a small device which monitors something a door a window a heart rate monitor a temperature monitor whatever these devices transmit that data to another more complicated device it could be a smartphone it could be a control unit of some kind like a smart thermostat or it could be a dedicated device that acts as a gateway to the internet this last category of device is known as an iot Gateway they are important because the sensors often don't have a direct connection to the internet they probably only have Bluetooth or some other low power connectivity like zigby once the iot Gateway has received the data from the sensor it can be sent further up into the cloud part of arm strategy can be seen with its embed OS device server while a web server would accept connections from web browsers running on PCS or smartphones the embed OS device server handles connections from iot devices it uses open source protocols including HTTP for data communication and for device management the embed OS device server would sit behind an iot Gateway and would use the gateway to talk to the iot devices it can also send the collected data higher up into the cloud imagine you wanted to control the temperature in your house your air conditioning unit will be monitoring the temperature and either keeping it at a certain level or it will be programmed to come on at a set hour this data is collected and sent up to the cloud via an iot Gateway via a server for you to monitor via the web or on your smartphone if you manage to get out of work early you might want to switch on the air conditioner in earlier so that the house is nice and cool when you arrive you can send that command via your smartphone and it will be relay back down the chain to the unit you can imagine other scenarios about the same thing to do with traffic control Street lighting and so on and so on this all sounds very utopian but of course there are dangers with all these devices sending data and receiving commands it won't be long before the hackers are drawn in a recent security report from Intel's macafe lab singled out iot as a potential area for security problems the report says that iot rated attacks will increase due to the predicted fast growth of the number of connected devices many of which will unfortunately have poor levels of security in 2013 at a white hat security conference it was demonstrated that you could hack webcams that were connected to the internet and the hackers were able to watch what was going on with the webcams last year there were several different reports about baby monitors that had been hacked and the attackers were watching the video feed of the babies in their rooms in extreme cases they were even screaming at the babies and waking them up and frightening them last year the BBC ran a story about a website that was dedicated just to streaming video feeds from hacked webcams and baby monitors this is creepy and quite disturbing but unfortunately it's the world that we live in however moving on another important concept of the inet things is M2M or machine to machine at one level M2M is what it says it is a way for one machine to talk to another machine however in this context it means how a connected device talks to the cloud it also includes how these devices are managed M2M isn't new in the sense that we are all used to one device talking to another file transfers over bluetooth app updates over Wi-Fi even emails are examples of how one machine talks to another machine to achieve a specific task however the special thing about M2M in terms of Internet of Things is that these connected devices have a a low power usage B aren't always on or awake and C are limited in terms of their resources like processing power and memory and so on all this technology sounds great for the consumer but probably the big money is to be made on larger scale projects smart buildings smart cities and iot enabled businesses are where the large contracts are to be won whole infrastructure is enabled for iot or endtoend business processes using iot at every step everything from garbage to electricity from trams to taxes from Parcels to production lines can be built to use iot the initial investment will be high for businesses however the benefits will lightly save money in the long term so the iot revolution has just started and there's going to be lots of advancements over the next few years it's going to be interesting to watch The Journey until we reach the seamless iot experience I'm sure along the way we're going to see some great Innovation coming from some surprising sources my name is Gary SS from Android authority hope you enjoyed this video if you did please give it a thumbs up also please use the comments below to tell me what you think about iot also don't forget to subscribe to Android Authority's YouTube channel and as for me I'll see you in my next video mehello there my name is Gary Sims Android authority and today I'm going to try and answer the question what is the Internet of Things the internet as we know it is going to change today it's a massive Global Network that allows people to communicate with each other we send emails we send instant messages we use websites to communicate to share data and it is the people who drive the internet the data that we send comes from client devices like a laptop or a PC or a tablet or a smartphone and it goes to some servers and the servers then transmit that data that information on further in that sense we can say that the internet is made up of three major actors the people the client devices they use and the servers but a whole new category of actor is being added to the internet they've been unglamorous called things hence the term internet of things so what is a thing we really it's any object that has a sens attached to it that can transmit the data from that sensor further up into the internet into the cloud where it can be analyzed and used to make decisions examples of such sensors include temperature sensors traffic sensors flow rate sensors energy usage monitors and so on a temperature sensor can be placed in a smart thermostat a smart electricity usage meter can be wired into a house or a traffic monitor can be placed into a traffic signal these things then send data further up the chain until either a person or a piece of computer software makes a decision based on that data it won't be long and maybe it's already happened but there will be more things on the internet sending data around than actual people using internet enabled devices the cell phone the internet email social media and smartphones have all changed the way we do things both at a personal level and at a business level clearly the internet of things will do the same thing our personal lives and our professional lives will be affected how they'll be affected isn't fully yet understood but for sure it will change things there are several big challenges ahead for the embryonic internet of things there are technological challenges in terms of the actual devices that collect and send data these challenges include both hardware and software issues like battery life maintenance interoperability and compatibility there are big data issues around Building Systems that can process all this data and use it to achieve meaningful tasks there are also security and privacy problems who wants to have a smart home that can be hacked nobody does or we still a smart hospital that can be breached remotely as we move from the individual Smart Homes to Smart cities which have Smart Transport Systems and smart infrastructure then all these issues become more complex and more difficult to solve correctly the reality of the internet of things from a consumer point of view took a giant leap forward this year when Samsung's co-ceo took took to the stage at CES 2015 to declare that all Samsung products will be Internet of Things enabled within 5 years if 2020 sounds like a long way off to you he also said that 90% of Samsung's products would be able to connect to the web by 2017 Samsung's plans are for every washing machine every air conditioning unit and every microwave oven to be iot enabled and 5 years from now every single piece of Samsung Hardware will be an iot device whether it is an air purifier or an oven in his speech the co-co also highlighted that the iot experience needs to be seamless for the consumer the iot experience has to be shimless I predict that this journey to the seamless experience will be quite bumpy however they're ACC companied like arm who are trying their best to smooth out the road as we go towards the end of 2014 arm announced a new operating system to boost the development of iot devices called embed OS it's a free operating system for arms cortex M range of microcontrollers one of the key points about embed OS is that it supports the important iot protocols and allows anybody from a hobbyist developer to a multi-million dollar Corporation to prototype and develop iot devices embed OS will include all the functionality needed to create create an iot device and to transmit that data to the cloud it supports a lot of different communication Stacks including ipv4 IPv6 six lowan Bluetooth Wi-Fi 2G GSM and 3G the interesting thing about Ed OS is that it falls into a very special class of operating system when we think about a smartphone it comes with an operating system like Android and Android itself is built on Linux and Linux is what we call a multitasking operating system and the resources in a modern day smartphone are quite large you've got a quad core maybe an octacore processor you've got a GPU you've got 1 gigs 2 gigs 3 gigs of RAM maybe 8 gigs of internal storage and so on a typical iot device will have a processor that runs at just 100 MHz not 1.5 GHz or 2 GHz like a smartphone it'll only have maybe 4K of memory or 96k of memory in the biggest case is 256k of memory and that's very different to three gigabyt of memory that we see in a smartphone it only have a tiny bit of storage maybe 32k 64k of flash storage that means that Internet of Things devices need a special type of operating system so I said there were four types of operating system the multitasking operating system is like Android and like Linux there's another type of operating system which is called an OS or a real-time operating system these are found in very small debet devices that you get in cars in Planes in industrial applications and they are Specialist typee of operating system that worries about how the schedu works how things happen in what order they happen where they happen within a certain time constraint now that sounds good for iot but that kind of system can be quite battery hungry or not very power efficient another approach is called the bare metal approach it really isn't an operating system in itself basically you have a loop that goes round round and round and round round for infinity and you run your code inside that Loop checking everything and just doing everything if you've used an Arduino you'll be familiar with that kind of idea the problem is that can't be maintained once the project gets particularly large it also doesn't allow for scheduling it doesn't allow for certain other things as well so it has its limitations and that brings us to the fourth type of operating system which is a low power operating system an operating system that's designed just to conserve power while performing its functions typically these operator systems are event driven rather than using polling always checking to see what's going on and that's the kind of category that the mbed OS fits into and it's very useful for internet of thing devices so what does the internet of things look like in terms of its structure it's quite simple at the thing end you have a small device which monitors something a door a window a heart rate monitor a temperature monitor whatever these devices transmit that data to another more complicated device it could be a smartphone it could be a control unit of some kind like a smart thermostat or it could be a dedicated device that acts as a gateway to the internet this last category of device is known as an iot Gateway they are important because the sensors often don't have a direct connection to the internet they probably only have Bluetooth or some other low power connectivity like zigby once the iot Gateway has received the data from the sensor it can be sent further up into the cloud part of arm strategy can be seen with its embed OS device server while a web server would accept connections from web browsers running on PCS or smartphones the embed OS device server handles connections from iot devices it uses open source protocols including HTTP for data communication and for device management the embed OS device server would sit behind an iot Gateway and would use the gateway to talk to the iot devices it can also send the collected data higher up into the cloud imagine you wanted to control the temperature in your house your air conditioning unit will be monitoring the temperature and either keeping it at a certain level or it will be programmed to come on at a set hour this data is collected and sent up to the cloud via an iot Gateway via a server for you to monitor via the web or on your smartphone if you manage to get out of work early you might want to switch on the air conditioner in earlier so that the house is nice and cool when you arrive you can send that command via your smartphone and it will be relay back down the chain to the unit you can imagine other scenarios about the same thing to do with traffic control Street lighting and so on and so on this all sounds very utopian but of course there are dangers with all these devices sending data and receiving commands it won't be long before the hackers are drawn in a recent security report from Intel's macafe lab singled out iot as a potential area for security problems the report says that iot rated attacks will increase due to the predicted fast growth of the number of connected devices many of which will unfortunately have poor levels of security in 2013 at a white hat security conference it was demonstrated that you could hack webcams that were connected to the internet and the hackers were able to watch what was going on with the webcams last year there were several different reports about baby monitors that had been hacked and the attackers were watching the video feed of the babies in their rooms in extreme cases they were even screaming at the babies and waking them up and frightening them last year the BBC ran a story about a website that was dedicated just to streaming video feeds from hacked webcams and baby monitors this is creepy and quite disturbing but unfortunately it's the world that we live in however moving on another important concept of the inet things is M2M or machine to machine at one level M2M is what it says it is a way for one machine to talk to another machine however in this context it means how a connected device talks to the cloud it also includes how these devices are managed M2M isn't new in the sense that we are all used to one device talking to another file transfers over bluetooth app updates over Wi-Fi even emails are examples of how one machine talks to another machine to achieve a specific task however the special thing about M2M in terms of Internet of Things is that these connected devices have a a low power usage B aren't always on or awake and C are limited in terms of their resources like processing power and memory and so on all this technology sounds great for the consumer but probably the big money is to be made on larger scale projects smart buildings smart cities and iot enabled businesses are where the large contracts are to be won whole infrastructure is enabled for iot or endtoend business processes using iot at every step everything from garbage to electricity from trams to taxes from Parcels to production lines can be built to use iot the initial investment will be high for businesses however the benefits will lightly save money in the long term so the iot revolution has just started and there's going to be lots of advancements over the next few years it's going to be interesting to watch The Journey until we reach the seamless iot experience I'm sure along the way we're going to see some great Innovation coming from some surprising sources my name is Gary SS from Android authority hope you enjoyed this video if you did please give it a thumbs up also please use the comments below to tell me what you think about iot also don't forget to subscribe to Android Authority's YouTube channel and as for me I'll see you in my next video me\n"