Internet of Things : An Overview for Beginners ( Real Life Examples)

Internet of Things An Overview for Beginners

In Today’s world Internet access to the people can be easily available. There is an estimation that nearly 5 billion people all over the world have an internet access by 2020. In fact, the Internet can be think as a boon to our society. When the IPv6 came into existence in July 2017, you can think that every device on the earth can be connected with each other. Even after connecting with IPv6 address, there will be a large number of addresses remain that it can connect devices on 100+ earth. Every device has their own IP address which is obviously an important part of implementing the Internet of Things.

In the coming years, every field like business, healthcare, e.t.c, you will see the benefits of integrating with the Internet of things. This article we will cover the Introduction to the Internet of Things. In addition, you will also know the architecture of IOT, issues facing and application of IOT.

Introduction to Internet of Things

Internet of Things An Overview for Beginners

You can think the Internet of things as devices or objects around us connected to the internet. Many devices come with inbuilt wifi, Bluetooth. These Devices embedded with sensors and actuators in micro-controller we can call it chips. Sensors gather the data and actuators take the actions after analyzing the data. In short, Internet of things enables to connect a large number of devices through internet and data exchanged in the real time.

Real Life Example of Internet of Things

Let’s understand more about IOT through a real-life example. Suppose you work for a company. The timing of your Job is 8.00 am to 9.00 pm. You have to leave for the job at 7.00 a.m morning. Therefore you set alarm one hour before leaving that is 6.00 am so that you can easily reach your job location at the right time at 8 am. But the questions come in mind what will happen if there is the traffic jam. Assume there is no other way from home to office. You must be thinking its obvious that we will be late to office.You are right you will get late. But is there any way we can reach office on time even there is the traffic jam. Yes, the Internet of Things can solve this problem.

There are two objects involving vehicles and an alarm clock. If all the vehicles and alarm clock are connected to the internet. Then these things will send data to a cloud server (cloud network). In fact, the following data would be collected from vehicles to know whether there is congestion on the road or not.

  1. The distance between cars.
  2. How long is the traffic jam?
  3. When congestion will end (time)?

All these data will gather on a separate cloud server. An alarm clock is also connected to the internet. It will gather the data from the cloud server to know the condition of the road and then automatically adjust the alarm clock timing. Thus you will wake on time and will easily reach the office on time. This example is the internet of things. I hope now, you have had learned how IOT works after reading the introduction to the internet of things. In the next section, you will know the architecture of IOT.

Basic Overview of Simple IOT Architecture

In this section, you will know how the Internet of Things works from the inside. In fact, you will know a general and simple Architecture of the Internet of things.

There are four things in the IOT architecture.

  1. Sensors and Actuators
  2. Wireline or Wireless Connection
  3. Information Technology Edge
  4. Cloud Storage for storing data

Sensors and Actuators

Sensors the devices that sense the information around the surrounding and collect it as the data. Actuators are action controllers. It will do actions according to the command provided by the system. At the first stage Sensors and actuators are embedded in the chips. There are many things happening inside or outside your surrounding. Sensors collect data from it and convert these data into useful data. In addition, actuators use the data and perform certain tasks according to the condition set on data. For example,  A building is fireproof designed. It means when there will be a fire in the building alarm will buzz automatically.

So, what is the reason behind automatically buzzing that is sensor and actuators? Sensors sense the building to find out is there any fire in the room of the building. In addition, actuator act to buzz the alarm using the data provided by the sensors. Robots, heart rate monitor, e.t.c are the other examples that use sensors and actuators.

The Architecture of IOT

Internet of things architecture contains the following three things.

  1. Sensors and Actuators
  2. Connectivity
  3. People and Process

Sensors and Actuators used to measure the physical quantity like sound, temperature, moisture e.t.c and convert it into an electric quantity for the measurement.

Connectivity acquires the signal through various communication medium like Wifi, Bluetooth e.t.c. Then its data are uploaded to the networks.

In the people and process, all the networks inputs and data are combined into the bidirectional system. In this system data, people and processes integrated for better decision making.

Various Issues in the Internet of Things

Although there are many issues you will find in the Internet of Things. But here I am listing out the major four issues in IOT.

Privacy Issues

There are many personal data like name, address, age, e.t.c are stored with the network service provides. As the IOT uses network connectivity. Therefore stored data may share with the other network providers.

Security Issues

IOT requires internet connectivity. As it contains many sensitive pieces of information, Its data and transactions are vulnerable to the Hackers. There may many IOT attacks happen to steal the personal and business information from the cloud servers.

Connective Issues

You all know the majority of data stores in the cloud servers. Then end users asked for authenticating for access the stored information. Therefore connective between the end users and servers comes in the role. You will always enthusiastic to find this issues and solve these issues for the continuation of the services.

Conclusion

IOT will make most of the connected devices make it smarter to benefit us. You will see in the forthcoming years, the internet of things are everywhere. There will be some issues in it for implementing it quickly until we find the solution. But IOT is the trending topic that attracts many new developers to focus the work on it.

I hope this article “Introduction to internet of things” benefited you in understanding how IOT works and issues in it. Please feel free to give suggestion on it by commenting or contacting us. Please subscribe also.

Data Science Learner Team

 

 

Join our list

Subscribe to our mailing list and get interesting stuff and updates to your email inbox.

Thank you for signup. A Confirmation Email has been sent to your Email Address.

Something went wrong.

Meet Abhishek ( Chief Editor) , a data scientist with major expertise in NLP and Text Analytics. He has worked on various projects involving text data and have been able to achieve great results. He is currently manages Datasciencelearner.com, where he and his team share knowledge and help others learn more about data science.
 
Thank you For sharing.We appreciate your support. Don't Forget to LIKE and FOLLOW our SITE to keep UPDATED with Data Science Learner