Internet of Things Wiki



Welcome to the Internet of Things Wiki
We hear a lot about the Internet of Things (IoT) nowadays, but what is it exactly? This Wiki gives a technological point of view of the subject to help understand it. The different pages will cover wireless technologies and protocols used in the IoT to describe an entire IoT application.

This Wiki has been created by students from the Faculty of Engineering of Mons to give a global overview of the IoT. Feel free to add content and to give us feedback to improve the site!

What is the IoT?
IoT stands for Internet of Things, describing the interconnection of what is usually called "smart devices". A smart object is basically any object (having any purpose) that is upgraded by technology to provide new capabilities. An electronic chip is usually added to the object to make it smart, enabling it to interact, process data and communicate. These are the main characteristics of the intelligence of things. The interaction firstly consists of collecting data about the direct environment of the object. These data are processed and possibly spread, and the processing eventually leads to a second interaction, the object acting according to the previous steps. The ability to sense, analyze, decide and react constitutes the core of smart devices.

Such smart devices can be used in many domains, and do not necessarily require any networking to work. Recent improvements in technologies, such as miniaturization and consumption reduction, helped to spread the use of these devices. In the ultra-connected world we live in, these objects were given the faculty to communicate with each other, thus creating the Internet of Things. The IoT, as its name suggests, looks alike the world wide Internet. It consists of the interconnection of huge amounts of smart devices that communicate and exchange data. Just as the Internet, it is a best-effort network that organizes itself so that any device can be added or removed. The network is commonly structured following this architecture: Recent trends led to a massive innovation wave in the IoT technologies, introducing lots of standards and techniques on the market. As the IoT is used in various domains and for many applications, it must be very versatile and provide multiple features to satisfy the requirements of each domain. Indeed, the characteristics as latency, security, throughput or power consumption needed by the applications will be drastically different according to the use case (transportation, industry, energy, …). There are many different technologies in the IoT, from the chips level (FPGA, microprocessor, micro-controller, …) to the communication protocols (MQTT, CoAP, 6LowPAN, …) and mediums (Wi-Fi, LoRa, ZigBee, PLC, …). All these different technologies provide different results, each having its advantages and drawbacks. This can sometimes create interoperability conflicts if devices using different technologies must communicate. Building an IoT application requires a deep reflexion about these factors in order to choose the technologies that fit the best for the use. To that purpose, it is important to know the different levels involved in a communication.
 * smart devices collect data and pre-process it before sending it
 * gateways gather information from multiple devices and transfer it on the Internet
 * backbone servers receive the information, process it and possibly send a feedback to the device

Smart cities
Smart cities use the IoT to improve urban life at many levels. Its benefits reach transports, parkings, security and many other themes. The large amount of data collected by smart devices city-wide help to take decisions at a municipal level. The development of smart cities is partly driven by the increasing urban population in the world. Smart cities infrastructures are implemented nowadays in more and more countries and in important cities such as capitals. When talking about smart cities, it generally concerns city-wide data collection instead of home automation (which is another domain of application of the IoT).

Industry 4.0
The purpose of Industry 4.0 is to improve productivity by using the principles of IoT. In the industry, smart devices mainly consist of sensors on machines that talk to each other to optimize production processes. Such technologies help production plants to be fully autonomous and to require less workforce. Machines can automatically take decisions and monitor themselves without the help of human operators. An example of improvement is e-maintenance: multiple sensors help to predict and prevent machine failure by collecting and reporting information about the health of the infrastructures to a centralized point. The process of detecting malfunction is eased and requires only one operator instead of multiple controllers.

Smart grid
The utility operators are nowadays confronted to an emerging problem: renewable energy production and discontinuous production. Because of the shift in energy policies, balancing the electrical grid becomes more and more complex, because production and consumption fluctuate unpredictably. Smart grids use sensors put on strategic points of the grid to collect data and manage the power traffic. This IoT solution offers a flexible and reactive way to answer to this problematic. Centralized information about the whole utility state helps to decide whether power plants must be turned on and off to balance the grid efficiently.

Skeleton of an IoT application


This image shows a typical IoT aplication. The device can be any sensor that has communication abilities. It sends data to the application servers (also called the back-end servers) through a gateway that can also be called the access point of the network. The communication with the gateway contains two levels: the communication mean and the protocol. These topics are extremely important to design an application and are discussed in separate pages. On the image, you can see the user-end side: some applications and services allow to see and send feedback from platforms such as phones and computers. This is possible simply by connecting to the back-end servers through the web.

This wiki provides an illustrative example of how to design an IoT application starting from this basic skeleton. It develops all the required steps and explains the different choices that lead to a working prototype.

All pages list
The list of all available pages on this wiki is available here.

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