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WDavidStephenson
I just finished a very simplified layman's intro to the IoT, and I wish I could ...
Ed608
According to an earlier EE Times article by Clive Maxfield, 7/7/11, the example ...
The intangible assets of the Internet of Things
R Colin Johnson
4/16/2012 3:04 PM EDT
IBM setting the pace
IBM is perhaps furthest along in realizing the IoT with existing technologies. For instance, the “mote” sensors it invented to optimize the heat and humidity produced by servers in data centers are now being used to preserve paintings at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. In Malta, IBM repurposed its wireless radio technology to enable the first national utility grid that has swapped out all of its analog gas meters for smart meters. And Edmonton, Alberta, is using IBM cloud-based analytics to optimize traffic management, leveraging existing infrastructure to track traffic flow in real-time.
As IBM did a decade ago, Hewlett-Packard Co. recently abandoned its PC-centric, one-computer-per-person business model and is reinventing itself as a service provider via its Smarter Planet-like Central Nervous System for the Earth (CeNSE) strategy. Both companies are now integrating all levels of the emerging IoT, from the sensors to the communications to the cloud-based analytics, hoping to extract business value from the expected trillion-node volumes that are already driving dollar costs per edge device down to the single digits.
“It’s not about making individual widgets, but rather about constructing a complete sensory system—a vertical solution that includes the sensors, networking, storage, servers, software and analytics,” said Stan Williams, senior fellow at HP Labs. “We don’t intend to sell components, but rather to provide real-time awareness and actionable information that has been distilled from colossal and rapidly evolving data streams.”
The richness of this emerging landscape of applications is creating possibilities beyond the wildest dreams of science fiction. “I wish I was starting out my engineering career today, because the next decade may be the most exciting era in the history of electronics innovation,” said Stephen Pawlowski, Intel senior fellow, general manager of the company’s Architecture Group, and chief technology officer of its Datacenter and Connected Systems Group.
The IoT promises to improve our lives both by solving known problems—such as allowing seniors to “age in place” safely and comfortably in automated, monitored homes—and by creating solutions for requirements we don’t yet realize we have. As Texas Instruments’ Ajith Amerasekera observed, “you don’t need it until you need it”; the marketplace will determine “which of the infinite possibilities in the Internet of Things people will really want.”
Amerasekera, TI’s R&D manager and the director of the company’s Kilby Labs, imagines smart rooms that recognize their occupants; automatically adjust various settings to suit a recognized individual’s preferences for, say lighting, temperature, humidity and entertainment; and even adjust monitoring functions to suit the individual’s personal health requirements.
“Your coffee cup could eventually have a network address” so it could signal your coffee pot to brew more, he said. “Today, you can’t even put a value on these endless possibilities.”
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IBM is perhaps furthest along in realizing the IoT with existing technologies. For instance, the “mote” sensors it invented to optimize the heat and humidity produced by servers in data centers are now being used to preserve paintings at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. In Malta, IBM repurposed its wireless radio technology to enable the first national utility grid that has swapped out all of its analog gas meters for smart meters. And Edmonton, Alberta, is using IBM cloud-based analytics to optimize traffic management, leveraging existing infrastructure to track traffic flow in real-time.
As IBM did a decade ago, Hewlett-Packard Co. recently abandoned its PC-centric, one-computer-per-person business model and is reinventing itself as a service provider via its Smarter Planet-like Central Nervous System for the Earth (CeNSE) strategy. Both companies are now integrating all levels of the emerging IoT, from the sensors to the communications to the cloud-based analytics, hoping to extract business value from the expected trillion-node volumes that are already driving dollar costs per edge device down to the single digits.
“It’s not about making individual widgets, but rather about constructing a complete sensory system—a vertical solution that includes the sensors, networking, storage, servers, software and analytics,” said Stan Williams, senior fellow at HP Labs. “We don’t intend to sell components, but rather to provide real-time awareness and actionable information that has been distilled from colossal and rapidly evolving data streams.”
The richness of this emerging landscape of applications is creating possibilities beyond the wildest dreams of science fiction. “I wish I was starting out my engineering career today, because the next decade may be the most exciting era in the history of electronics innovation,” said Stephen Pawlowski, Intel senior fellow, general manager of the company’s Architecture Group, and chief technology officer of its Datacenter and Connected Systems Group.
The IoT promises to improve our lives both by solving known problems—such as allowing seniors to “age in place” safely and comfortably in automated, monitored homes—and by creating solutions for requirements we don’t yet realize we have. As Texas Instruments’ Ajith Amerasekera observed, “you don’t need it until you need it”; the marketplace will determine “which of the infinite possibilities in the Internet of Things people will really want.”
Amerasekera, TI’s R&D manager and the director of the company’s Kilby Labs, imagines smart rooms that recognize their occupants; automatically adjust various settings to suit a recognized individual’s preferences for, say lighting, temperature, humidity and entertainment; and even adjust monitoring functions to suit the individual’s personal health requirements.
“Your coffee cup could eventually have a network address” so it could signal your coffee pot to brew more, he said. “Today, you can’t even put a value on these endless possibilities.”
 Vitality Inc.'s GlowCaps use Telit's wireless modems for smart pill dispensers that prompt patients to take their meds, monitor when pills are taken, report adherence back to doctors and send refill requests to pharmacies at the push of a button. SOURCE: Vitality Inc. Click on image to enlarge. |
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R_Colin_Johnson
4/16/2012 5:01 PM EDT
The Internet-of-Things threatens to dwarf the Internet-of-People, as machine-to-machine interactions dominate even our personal spaces. Right now I am writing this comment on my iPad-3 while viewing the ballgame on my iPad-2 and keeping track of my upcoming appointments on my smartphone--all of which are linked together via WiFi and up to the cloud for auto-synchronization with Ethernet to my broadband cable modem. Already the bandwidth used by my keystrokes dwarfs the bandwidth used my machines all talking to each other and the cloud. In the future, nearly everything electronic will have an IP address, thanks to chips sets that are already poised to dip below $1, and with IPv6 in place, there is plenty of space avialable for more. One pet peeve of mine that I hope will be cured by the Internet of things is weather prediction. With realtime sensor network input from around the globe combined with cloud-based analytics running on cluster supercomputers, can't we at least get tomorrow's weather right! But perhaps Aristotle said it best: Hope is a waking daydream.
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Goffers
4/17/2012 9:59 AM EDT
Do you think that cloud-based analytics will be able to distinguish between cirrus and cumulus?
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iniewski
4/16/2012 6:06 PM EDT
I think you are right Colin, accurate, local weather prediction should be available soon if the sensor density is large enough...will government deliver that service or woudl provide companies provide it (presummably for a fee)...Kris
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docdivakar
4/16/2012 6:31 PM EDT
@iniewski: much of the weather data belongs to the USGS and/or the local governments that have installed the monitoring stations. I have come across a couple of startups that are trying to provide access to these real time data using cloud model.
I recognize what is installed in the weather stations may not have the granularity and the communication interfaces that consumers expect to access. I am not sure where the investments are going to come from given the challenging times we are in!
MP Divakar
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GREAT-Terry
4/17/2012 4:30 AM EDT
Will the world really have enough IP address for all things? I can't imagine how many IP address will be needed if your coffee cup also has a unique address!
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Ed608
5/4/2012 1:23 AM EDT
According to an earlier EE Times article by Clive Maxfield, 7/7/11, the example stated for IPv6 addresses comes to mind:
"Well, as one simple example, according to calculations and estimations performed by the folks at the University of Hawaii (who obviously have far too much time on their hands), if we account for all of the beaches around the world, together they contain around 7.5 x 1018 grains of sand. Thus, the addressing space of IPv6 is sufficient to give each grain of sand its own unique IP address – and to do this for approximately 5 x 1019 Earthlike worlds – so I don’t think we’re going to run out of IPv6 addresses in the foreseeable future."
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prabhakar_deosthali
4/17/2012 6:45 AM EDT
In my opinion , this Internet of things is going to create such a huge amount of data in real time that just collecting, analyzing and disseminating the results of the analysis in real time to the right place is going to be a gigantic activity requiring mammoth data centers in multiple clouds.
and you bet 90% of this all activity will churn out trash - like the thousands of useless emails of each person being preserved on those email servers for free!
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R_Colin_Johnson
4/17/2012 12:23 PM EDT
One approach being proposed by IBM and Intel is to only send exceptional data up to the cloud. By using smart local analytics, 99 percent of the raw data can be discarded, and only the one percent that makes a difference being networked. That said, with trillions of network edge devices out there, this will still be a deluge.
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docdivakar
4/17/2012 8:30 PM EDT
@R_Colin_Johnson: the selective storage & use of data depends on the application. Elsewhere on EETimes I gave the example of Brazil Tags which monitors cars moving thru toll gates (electronic license plates, hard to follow for thieves if there is no license plate number in the car!!). It is supposed to be collecting several gigabytes of data in a day from one city alone. This can add up to terabytes in a few months and with all cities reporting, may reach many hellabytes in a couple of years!
MP Divakar
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BetweenMyths
4/17/2012 9:09 AM EDT
The Semantic Web and Internet of Things
http://kencraggs.yolasite.com/
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iniewski
4/17/2012 10:52 AM EDT
That could be true @prabhakar, it is very likely that 90% of the data will be useless, quite possibly 99%...let's take security sensors, most of the time they will report nothing, everything is OK...the same with patient monitoring devices or bridge sensors...for others like weather sensors the data point will be used once when weather forecast is updated...but all of that should not matter, the remaining 10% or 1% (or maybe 0.1%) will be valuable, possibly very valuable and the infrastructure to handle all that data will be build as it will be a profitable business...Kris
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dougwithau
4/17/2012 6:13 PM EDT
10K nodes in a Zigbee network. Maybe in the marketing copy, but not in real life. I have personal experience with this stuff. Please, do your own research before you believe this fluff piece.
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R_Colin_Johnson
4/17/2012 7:38 PM EDT
The maximum number of nodes depends on the number of layers, children and routers in you application. The formula by which you can calculate the maximum is given in the following article, whcih gives examples iwth 861 and 55,000 nodes. The 10,000 number was just a ballpark. To calculate the maximum number in your application, see this article:
http://www.eetimes.com/design/industrial-control/4003651/Zigbee-meshes-with-sensor-nets
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iniewski
4/17/2012 7:02 PM EDT
if 10k is not the right number what is the practical number of devices that can be connected in a Zigbee network @dougwithau? Kris
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dougwithau
4/18/2012 2:07 PM EDT
In existing networks a number like 12 is a practical network. Maybe they are referencing the newer 2.0 stuff that is not out yet.
The issue is routing, a device has to know about all other devices on the network. That is in conflict with Zigbee being a protocol for small, memory constrained devices.
Theory is great, but real world can be different.
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ssoelberg
4/19/2012 5:00 PM EDT
Colin, I’m glad to see you dig into the link between the Internet-of-Things and Big Data. However, candidly at KORE Telematics we have a slightly different take on it. It is easy to assume that trillions of sensors monitoring the status of everything will result in exabytes of data to process, but there’s actually a touch of fallacy in that assumption, in my opinion. We’ve done some fairly extensive analysis of the applications running on our dedicated M2M network and found that about 90 percent of cellular-connected M2M applications in the world today probably move less than one MB of data, collectively, in a month. Why? Because majority of actionable information to be garnered from the Internet-of-Things is “exception based” The last thing we need is to have our systems bombarded with information telling us everything is fine. When you discount for that data, the equation becomes drastically altered. We blog about it here: http://blog.koretelematics.com/2012/01/more-m2m-devices-obviously-means-more-data-to-process-right-not-so-fast.html
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iniewski
4/19/2012 5:06 PM EDT
Interesting data point @ssoelberg, 1Mb is shocking low (I suspect it was low as per my post earlier but not that low)...BTW, would you be interested in presenting those findings at emerging technologies conference in Vancouver I am chairing? (www.cmoset.com), kris.iniewski@gmail.com
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DrQuine
4/21/2012 9:29 AM EDT
Transmitting exception data or changes has the potential to substantially reduce data transmissions as well as the need for storage at the receiving end. It also makes a lot of sense. At most, a brief signal could be sent indicating "monitoring successfully" to rule out the possibility that the sensor is off-line or failed. We've all been deluged at one time or another with floods of unnecessary data that essentially told us "no problem".
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Yokr
4/22/2012 9:02 PM EDT
The practical data for M2M system may be much less: I did a sewage signal system last year and the real practical data is discharge volume at 12:00 am every day, and accident report, which seldom happen.
However the system send status report to the sewage treatment plan every 20-30 sec. Those data carry a lot of information about the system. i.e. the pump on vs. flow rate will be an indication of the worn and tear of the pumps, while changes of pump on time vs. discharge volume will be an indication of the pipe resistance change.
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MindTech
4/23/2012 12:15 PM EDT
"And Edmonton, Alberta, is using IBM cloud-based analytics to optimize traffic management, leveraging existing infrastructure to track traffic flow in real-time."
We are? Cool!
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WDavidStephenson
6/4/2012 2:50 PM EDT
I just finished a very simplified layman's intro to the IoT, and I wish I could pull it to include many of the quotations in this excellent piece. Congratulations on a job well done.
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