Architecting IoT Solutions

The IoT Dream 👽

We have all seen in movies or read in books the scenario where you have a personal AI assistant that manages all your personal work and even suggests stuff based on your mood whether its something to read or some music to listen to.

Here is a fictional scenario where you wake up after a deep night sleep but meanwhile at night you sleeping behaviour was monitored by a sensor, your sleeping data has been sent to a gateway to aggregate all your sleeping data and send it to a cloud provider to provide analyitics about your sleeping behaviour and provide feedback of what is your mood going to be and send it back to your personal assistant to play you some music based on your mood analyitics

If you think this is science fiction and indeed it was years ago before internet of things came to the scene , now it has become a reality that we live in.

IoT touches and is going,undoubtley, to impact a lot of industries and has already done so .

you might wonder what are the sectors that is impacted by the IoT technology? 🤔

IoT impacts the following sectors and is continuing to revolutinize alot of industries includnig:

• Health care
• Industrial,Manufacturing and Industry 4.0 (IIOT)
• Smart Cities
• Consumer Electronics
• Retail,Financial and marketing
• Transportation and Logistics
• Supply Chain
• Agriculture
• Energy

As you can see the IoT technology touches alot of industries that can be improved using IoT technology and create new revenue streams.

Market Trend 💹

As you can see from the above image the market trend is tending towards increasing the value of connected devices, as the number of connected devices is increasing drastically each and every year.

Despite the corona virus and the shortage in electronic chips the number of connected devices is increasing. The number of connected IoT devices using cellular technology grew 18% year-over-year (YoY) to reach 2 billion by the end of the first half (1H) of 2021. China Mobile, China Telecom, and China Unicom account for almost three-quarters of the market. In the past 12 months, China Telecom grew 42% and increased its market share by more than two percentage points. Vodafone continues to lead the global market outside of China with a 6% global market share. US-based AT&T grew 22% YoY and held a 4% global market share in 1H 2021. IoT initiatives in China during the last 1.5 years were much less affected by COVID-19 and, in many cases, continued as planned after a short COVID-19 lockdown.

The increasing the number of devices means increasing the data transmitted by these devices and data is the new oil

Driving context from these transmitted data will always create new revenue streams.

Role of an Architect 👨‍💻

The emergence of IoT made new roles to emerge , an IoT Solutions Architect is one of them .

As an IoT Solution Architect you will have to play a lot of roles and wear many hats in the organization due to the nature of the IoT technology.

you will have to understand what the customer is building and what the use cases is required to achieve what the customer wants.

IoT systems are not a a fire and forget type of design , it requires fine grained solutions that fulfill the business need of the customer.

The Value of IoT is not due to a single device sending some data but the value comes from a mesh of devices and aggregating the data transmitted to derive value and context.

Well this might seem like it makes a lot of sense , the task to actually do it is very difficult due to a lot of factors to be discussed in a separate blog.

As an IoT Solutions Architect you will have to understand alot of integration techniques that fit the use cases and make sure it doesn't break your rules as you will have to integrate with hardware devices which come from different vendors , each vendor might support different protocols that need to be considered in development life cycle.

IoT ecosystem 🧐

The Value of the Network 💵

It has been argued that the value of a Network is based on Metcalfe's law Robert Metcalfe formulated the concept of that the value of any network is proportional to the squre of connected users of a system.

Incase of IoT users may mean sensors or edge devices.

The IoT ecosystem can be classified into the following:

• Sensing and power 🔋
• Data communication 📡
• Internet protocols and Routing 📳
• Fog ,edge computing ,analytics and machine learning 🤖
• Threat and Security ☢️

Sensing and Power 🔋:

This aspect greatly affects the power of the network so choosing the devices deployed on a network and how their power is handled will greatly affect the quality of the system.

Architect has to choose devices ranging from Sensors , small Microcontrollers to edge devices that can run without the need for internet connectivity on its own.

Data Communication 📡:

Latency , Bandwidth , and power management are really the main concerns when choosing the communication protocol between devices and the cloud.

An Architect has to choose the communication protocol as well and use tools to analyze alot of factors such as:

• wireless radio dynamics
• range and power analysis
• signal-to-noise ratio
• path loss
• interference.

An Architect has to understand meter to meter communication, these are known as PAN or Personal area networks.

these Porotocols include :

• Zigbee
• Zwave
• BLE
• 6LowPAN
• Thread

Internet Protocols and Routing 📳 :

To bridge data from sensors to the internet, two technologies are needed: gateway routers and supporting IP-based protocols designed for efficiency.

Also the role of router technologies at the edge for bridging sensors on a PAN network to the internet. The role of the router is especially important in securing, managing, and steering data. Edge routers orchestrate and monitor underlying mesh networks and balance and level data quality. The privatization and security of data is also critical.

Fog and edge compute, analytics, and machine learning 🤖 :

An Architect has to understand different ingestor engines,data lakes,analytics engines , how different cloud providers differ in services from each other and which cloud provider to use for each specific use case.

Not all use cases require that the data is migrated to a cloud provider for further processing, discovering the other alternatives as Fog computing and processing the data on the edge is important as an Architect.

Threat and Security ☢️ :

An Architect must have a good understandig of good security measures to mitigate cyber attacks as sensors and devices are not limited to home but are in remote areas and are vulnerable, attacking sensor nodes can be very critical and could lead to seriuos economic losses .

We Will Cover each and every point in detail in the next blogs

ARIGATO GOZAIMASU ありがと ございます