Overview

Internet of Things (IoT) refers to the interconnection of billions of devices spreading around the world over the internet making an internet of devices. Things, in the IoT, can refer to a wide variety of devices such as heart monitoring implants, biochip transponders on farm animals, automobiles with built-in sensors, or field operation devices that assist fire-fighters in search and rescue. Typically, IoT is expected to offer advanced connectivity of devices, systems, and services that goes beyond machine-to-machine communications (M2M) and covers a variety of protocols, domains, and applications. The interconnection of these embedded devices (including smart objects), is expected to usher in automation in nearly all fields, while also enabling advanced applications like a Smart Grid. The IoT is connecting new places–such as manufacturing floors, energy grids, healthcare facilities, and transportation systems–to the Internet. When an object can represent itself digitally, it can be controlled from anywhere. This connectivity means more data, gathered from more places, with more ways to increase efficiency and improve safety and security.

One example could be of smart home. Your smart house would have the ability to send data to a website where you could monitor all the important as well as inconsequential telemetry of your abode, including regular updates from every single one of your appliances, built-in cameras, your thermostat, and so on.

Industry Trend

Practically, everyone is talking about the Internet of Things and billions on interconnected device going to change our lives forever. IoT has become the main topic in all the tradeshows and summits happening right now. According to Gartner, there will be nearly 26 billion devices on the Internet of Things by 2020. ABI Research estimates that more than 30 billion devices will be wirelessly connected to the Internet of Things (Internet of Everything) by 2020. As per a recent survey and study done by Pew Research Internet Project, a large majority of the technology experts and engaged Internet users who responded—83 percent—agreed with the notion that the Internet/Cloud of Things, embedded and wearable computing (and the corresponding dynamic systems) will have widespread and beneficial effects by 2025. Judging by the amount of coverage, the high-visibility presence of high-profile vendors, the emerging crop of tradeshows, and the inevitable stream of books, you might think that the IoT is an imminent.

Industry is moving towards adopting IoT by converting all protocols to IP based protocols.

Growth Prospects

There is no doubt that next decade is all about IoT. All industries are going to get benefit from IoT, hardware vendors, software service vendors, etc. Every hardware vendor wants to participate (processors, wi-fi/Bluetooth, monitoring devices, screens, and so on), and every software vendor wants a role in a scenario in which literally billions of Internet endpoints suddenly teem forth as data collections points.

As per industrial-ip organization, 14.4 trillion USD is at stake from the internet of things that can be realized by 2022. See the chart below prepared by industrial-ip organization.

Most of this business will be coming from manufactures. Industrial firms are reporting benefits ranging from a boost in labor productivity and collaboration, to greater overall equipment efficiency, better market agility, and positive customer experiences. As an example, manufacturers, who are deploying architectures to support the IoT revolution say they are reaping benefits from opening up information flows between plant systems and business applications. As these information silos disappear, disconnects between the floor and the business are diminishing. For example, R&D departments are now working in tandem with manufacturing planners, streamlining the introduction of new products. Using dashboards and mobile devices, managers and engineers react immediately to shifting production needs, operational issues and market scenarios. The result, managers say, is like having an "enterprise-wide decision engine" that enables them to speed new products to market and execute supply chain adjustments faster than before.

Challenges

Along with growth, there are various challenges that IoT is facing. In addition to many secondary issues, network infrastructure, security, and data formats are the salient questions. The last two items, especially security, are important obstacles. Security violations will no longer mean just the simple, but now accepted, bother of waiting for new credit cards and monitoring your credit profile. Rather, a breach means access to very personal data about you, your family, your car, your home, your possessions, etc. The danger is significant. If I can read sensor data in your house, I might well be able to know that despite the lights being on, the TV playing, and the car in the driveway, there is nobody home. And equally frightening, I might be able to issue commands to the various connected devices.

However, security alone is not a big enough obstacle to prevent the IoT. It's just one that will need to be handled before mass adoption. Network infrastructure, however, is a whole different story. If each device becomes an Internet endpoint, there is little doubt that IPv4 will run out of numbers almost immediately (as it's been on the verge of doing for much of this decade). While it's certainly possible that NAT will allow devices to operate behind a single IP address and then post data for retrieval elsewhere, this is not the design generally presented nor one that is particularly desirable. It seems fairly clear that for IoT to become a reality, the world needs to move to IPv6. Most ISPs today and most networked devices are IPv6-ready, but only a tiny fraction have actually switched over.