These industries will rely on the hardware, software, and services provided by the bulk of the IT industry. Nearly every major technology company is investing or has invested heavily in IoT space. New markets and technologies have already formed (and some have collapsed or been acquired). Throughout this book, we will touch on nearly every segment in information technology, as they all have a role in IoT:

• Sensors: Embedded systems, real-time operating systems, energy-harvesting sources, Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMs).
• Sensor communication systems: Wireless personal area networks reach from 0 cm to 100 m. Low-speed and low-power communication channels, often non-IP based have a place in sensor communication.
• Local area networks: Typically, IP-based communication systems such as 802.11 Wi-Fi used for fast radio communication, often in peer-to-peer or...

The internet starts or ends with an event: a simple motion, a temperature change, perhaps an actuator moving on a lock. Unlike many IT devices in existence, IoT in a large part is about a physical action or event. It responds to affect a real-world attribute. Sometimes this involves considerable data being generated from a single sensor, such as auditory sensing for preventative maintenance of machinery. Other times, it's a single bit of data indicating vital health data from a patient. Whatever the case may be, sensing systems have evolved and made use of Moore's law in scaling to sub-nanometer sizes and significantly reduced costs. When one talks about the billions of devices in IoT, this is what they are referring to and why there will be billions of devices in reality. This chapter explores the depths of MEMs, sensing, and other...

A significant portion of this book surrounds connectivity and networking. There are countless other sources that dive deep into application development, predictive analytics, and machine learning. This book too will cover those topics, but an equal amount of emphasis is given to data communications. The IoT wouldn't exist without significant technologies to move data from the remotest and most hostile environment to the largest data centers at Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM. The acronym IoT contains the word internet, and because of that, we need to dive deep into networking, communications, and even signal theory. The starting point for IoT isn't sensors or the application; it's about connectivity, as we will see throughout this book. A successful architect will understand the constraints of internetworking...

To bridge data from sensors to the internet, two technologies are needed: gateway routers and supporting IP-based protocols designed for efficiency. This section explores 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. The chapter will explore the router role in creating virtual private networks, virtual LANs, and software-defined wide-area networks. There literally may be thousands of nodes serviced by a single edge router, and in a sense, it serves as an extension to the cloud, as we will see in the Chapter 10, Cloud and Fog Topologies...

At this point, we must consider what to do with the data streaming in from edge nodes into a cloud service. First, we begin by talking about the aspects of cloud architectures such as SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS systems. An architect needs to understand the data flow and typical design of cloud services (what they are and how they are used). We use OpenStack as a model of cloud design and explore the various components from ingestor engines, to data lakes, to analytics engines. Understanding the constraints of cloud architectures is also important to make a good judgment on how a system will deploy and scale. An architect must also understand how latency can affect an IoT system. Alternatively, not everything belongs in the cloud. There is a measurable cost in moving all IoT data to a cloud versus processing it...

We conclude the book with a survey of IoT compromises and attacks. In many cases, IoT systems will not be secured in a home, or in a company. They will be in the public, in very remote areas, in moving vehicles, or even inside a person. The IoT represents the single biggest attack surface for any type of cyber attack. We have seen countless academic hacks, well-organized cyber assaults, and even nation-state security breaches with IoT devices being the target. This chapter will detail several aspects of such breaches and types of remediation any architect must consider to make a consumer or enterprise IoT deployment a good citizen of the internet. We explore the proposed Congressional Act to secure the IoT, and understand the motivation and impact of such government mandate.  

The chapter will checklist the typical...

This book will bridge the spectrum of technologies that comprise the IoT. We summarized the domains and topics covered in this chapter. An architect must be cognizant of the interactions between these disparate engineering disciplines to build a system that is scalable, robust, and optimized. An architect will also be called upon to provide supporting evidence that the IoT system provides a value to the end user or the customer. Here, we learned about the application of Metcalfe's and Beckstrom's laws as tools for supporting an IoT deployment.

In the next chapter and those that follow, we will dive into IoT architecture from the sensor to the cloud, and everything in between.