Internet of Things for Architects: Architecting IoT solutions by implementing sensors, communication infrastructure, edge computing, analytics, and security

Industrial IoT (IIoT) is one of the fastest and largest segments in the overall IoT space by the number of connected things and the value those services bring to manufacturing and factory automation. This segment has traditionally been the world of operations technology (OT). This involves hardware and software tools to monitor physical devices. Traditional information technology roles have been administered differently than OT roles. OT will be concerned with yield metrics, uptime, real-time data collection and response, and systems safety. The IT role will concentrate on security, groupings, data delivery, and services. As the IoT becomes prevalent in industry and manufacturing, these worlds will combine especially with predictive maintenance from thousands of factory and production machines to deliver an unprecedented amount of data to private and public cloud infrastructure.

Some of the characteristics of this segment include the need to provide near real-time or at real-time decisions for OT. This means latency is a major issue for IoT on a factory floor. Additionally, downtime and security are a top concern. This implies the need for redundancy, and possibly private cloud networks and data storage. The industrial segment is one of the fastest-growing markets. One nuance of this industry is the reliance of brownfield technology, meaning hardware and software interfaces that are not mainstream. It is often the case that 30-year-old production machines rely on RS485 serial interfaces rather than modern wireless mesh fabrics.

Consumer-based devices were one of the first segments to adopt things being connected on the internet. Consumer IoT came into form as  a connected coffee pot at a university in the 1990s.  It  flourished with the adoption of Bluetooth for consumer use in the early 2000s. Now millions of homes that have Nest thermostats, Hue lightbulbs,  Alexa assistants, and Roku set-top boxes. People too are connected with Fitbits and other wearable technology.  The consumer market is usually first to adopt these new technologies. We can also think of these as gadgets. All are neatly packaged and wrapped devices that are essentially plug and play.

One of the constraints in the consumer market is the bifurcation of standards. We see, for example, several WPAN protocols have a footing like Bluetooth, Zigbee, and Z-wave (all being non-interoperable). 

This segment also has common traits in the healthcare market, with wearable devices and home health monitors. We keep them separate for this discussion, and healthcare will grow beyond simple connected home health devices (for example, beyond the functionality of a Fitbit).

This category refers to any space where consumer-based commerce transacts. This can be a brick and mortar store or a pop-up kiosk. Additionally, this category refers to why we include financial institutions and marketing fields in this area. These include traditional banking services and insurers, but also leisure and hospitality services. Retail IoT impact is already in process, with the goal of lowering sales costs and improving customer experience. This is done with a myriad of IoT tools. For simplicity in this book, we also add advertising and marketing to this category. 

This segment measures value in immediate financial transactions. If the IoT solution is not providing that response, its investment must be scrutinized. This drives constraints on finding new ways to either save costs, or drive revenue. Allowing customers to be more efficient allows retailers and service industries to move customers quickly, and to do so with less staffing resources. 

The healthcare industry will contend with industrial and logistics for the top spot in revenue and impact on IoT. Any and all systems that improve the quality of life and reduce health costs is a top concern in nearly every developed country. The IoT is poised to allow for remote and flexible monitoring of patients wherever they may be. Advanced analytics and machine learning tools will observe patients in order to diagnose illness and prescribe treatments. Such systems will also be the watchdogs in the event of needed life-critical care. Currently, there are about 500 million wearable health monitors, with double-digit growth in the years to come.

The constraints on healthcare systems are significant. From HIPAA compliance to the security of data, IoT systems need to act like hospital quality tools and equipment. Field systems need to communicate with healthcare centers 24/7, reliably and with zero downtime if the patient is being monitored at home. Systems may need to be on a hospital network while monitoring a patient in an emergency vehicle.  

Transportation and logistics will be significant, if not the leading driver in IoT. The use cases involve tracking the asset on devices being delivered, transported, or shipped, whether that's on a truck, train, plane, or boat. This is also the area of connected vehicles that communicate to offer assistance to the driver, or preventative maintenance on behalf of the driver. Right now, an average vehicle purchased new off a lot will have about 100 sensors. That number will double as vehicle-to-vehicle communication, vehicle-to-road communication, and automated driving become must-have features for safety or comfort. This has important roles beyond consumer vehicles, and extends to rail lines and shipping fleets that cannot absorb any downtime. We will also see service trucks that can track assets within a service vehicle. Some of the use cases can be very simple, but also very costly, such as monitoring the location of service vehicles in the delivery of stock. Systems are needed to automatically route trucks and service personnel to locations based on demand versus routine.

This mobile-type category has the requirement of geolocation awareness. Much of this comes from GPS navigation. From an IoT perspective, the data analyzed would include assets and time, but also spatial coordinates.

Farming and environmental IoT includes elements of livestock health, land and soil analysis, micro-climate predictions, efficient water usage, and even disaster predictions in the case of geological and weather-related disasters. Even as the world population growth slows down, world economies are becoming more affluent. Hunger and starvation crises are rare. That said, the demand for food production is set to double by 2035. Significant efficiencies in agriculture can be achieved through IoT. Using smart lighting to adjust the spectrum frequency based on poultry age can increase growth rates and decrease mortality rates based on stress on chicken farms. Additionally, smart lighting systems could save $1 billion annually on energy versus the common dumb incandescent lighting currently used. Other uses include detecting livestock health based on sensor movement and positioning. A cattle farm could find animals with the propensity of sickness before a bacterial or viral infection were to spread. Edge analysis systems could find, locate, and isolate heads of cattle in real time, using data analytics or machine learning approaches.  

This segment also has the distinction of being in remote areas (volcanoes) or sparse population centers (corn field). This has impacts on data communication systems that we will need to consider in later Chapter 5, Non-IP Based WPAN and Chapter 7, Long-Range Communication Systems and Protocols (WAN).

The energy segment includes the monitoring of energy production at source to and through the usage energy at the client. A significant amount of research and development has focused on consumer and commercial energy monitors such as smart electric meters that communicate over low-power and long-range protocols to reveal real-time energy usage. 

Many energy production facilities are in remote or hostile environments such as desert regions for solar arrays, steep hillsides for wind farms, and hazardous facilities for nuclear reactors. Additionally, data may need real-time or near real-time response for critical response to energy production control systems (much like manufacturing systems). This can impact how an IoT system is deployed in this category. We will talk about issues of real-time responsiveness later in this book.

Smart city is a phrase used to imply connecting intelligence to what had been an unconnected world. Smart cities are one of the fastest growing segments, and show substantial cost/benefit ratios especially when we consider tax revenues. Smart cities also touch citizens' lives through safety, security, and ease of use. For example, several cities such as Barcelona are fully connected and monitor trash containers and bins for pickup based on the current capacity, but also the time since the last pickup. This improves the trash collection efficiency allowing the city to use fewer resources and tax revenue in transporting waste, but also eliminates potential smells and odors of rotting organic material. Smart cities are also impacted by government mandates and regulations (as we will explore later), therefore there are ties to the government segment. 

One of the characteristics of smart city deployment may be the number of sensors used. For example, a smart camera installation on each street corner in New York would require over 3,000 cameras. In other cases, a city such as Barcelona will deploy nearly one million environmental sensors to monitor electric usage, temperature, ambient conditions, air quality, noise levels, and parking spaces. These all have low bandwidth needs versus a streaming video camera, but the aggregate amount of data transmitted will be nearly the same as the surveillance cameras in New York. These characteristics of quantity and bandwidth need to be considered in building the correct IoT architecture.

City, state, and federal governments, as well as the military, have a keen interesting in IoT deployments. Take California's executive order B-30-15 (https://www.gov.ca.gov/news.php?id=18938), which states that by 2030 greenhouse gas emissions affecting global warming will be at levels 40 percent below 1990 levels. To achieve aggressive targets like this, environmental monitors, energy sensing systems, and machine intelligence will need to come into play to alter energy patterns on demand while still keeping the California economy breathing. Other cases include projects like the Internet Battlefield of Things, with the intent of providing efficiencies for friendly, personal, and counter-attacks on enemies. This segment also ties into the smart city category when we consider the monitoring of government infrastructures like highways and bridges.  

The government's role in the IoT also comes into play in the form of standardization, frequency spectrum allocation, and regulations. Take, for example, how the frequency space is divided, secured, and portioned to various providers. We will see throughout this text how certain technologies came to be through federal control.