Connectivity concepts

Let's go through a list of different concepts that will help us explain the different IoT connectivity options that we will discuss in this chapter.

Basic network components

If you have two computing devices or nodes such as a computer, printer, or server and they need to talk to each other, you simply connect those devices directly, either by a wire/cable or wirelessly (through radio waves, as we will explain later in this chapter). Each device should have a network interface card (NIC) or a modem that will be responsible for sending data (in the case of a sender device) or receiving data (in the case of a receiver device). Before sending data that is in binary format (that is, 0s and 1s) via a transmission medium such as cables (such as twisted-pair cables, coaxial cables, and optical fiber cables) or through a wireless medium such as radio waves, you will need to encode or convert the data into a format that is understood by the transmission medium...