Chapter 2: The "I" in IoT – IoT Connectivity

Connectivity plays an important role in the internet of things (IoT)—without connectivity, it would not be called IoT, being called something else.

In this chapter, we will cover different topics around IoT connectivity. There is a huge number of different IoT connectivity technologies available on the market, hence we thought that it would be difficult and boring to delve deep into each connectivity option available. We followed another approach to tackle this challenge—we will start by exploring some of the important concepts regarding networking and connectivity in general, such as network topologies, the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model, the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) model, radio, wired versus wireless networks, network performance metrics, and many other concepts that are required to understand different IoT connectivity options. We will also look at the different...