Internet of All The Things

This article is for those who have passively consumed press about the Internet of Things over the past couple years, trying to track the changing topology of such a vast, complex landscape. This article intends to build a map around the events, technology, and possibilities that continue to shape this winding narrative.

Video chat from The Jetsons, Life Imitates Art

“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” — Thomas Watson, President of IBM, 1943. Some quotes age like fine milk.

In a world of endless predictions about the future, you’d be forgiven for doubting the Internet of Things (IoT) revolution would happen even as recently as five years ago. The dream of ever-present automation has been tried and failed countless times since the industrial revolution. We can muse at the 60s space-age cartoon The Jetsons, where video communicator watches and 3D printed meals seemed so specialized as to boarder on the absurd. Now, we live in a world where computerized devices like smart cutting boards and water bottles — while not the norm — are not science fiction. The Internet of Things are here now, working in our daily lives in myriad invisible ways.

In my house, smart lightbulbs slowly illuminate every morning at 5:30am. When I awake, before even greeting my wife, I’ll grab the iPhone and check for any early morning emails or meetings, before slapping on an Apple Watch. I slide my feet into a pair of Nike Adapt BB self-lacing shoes and head out for my morning run. Arion Smart Insole pressure sensors track how my feet strike, which I study to adjust my gait. I like to wear my AirPod smart earbuds while running, streaming music or audiobooks from the smart watch via the embedded LTE cellphone data network. No phone is required here, and the watch tracks my speed, route, and estimates calories burned. It’s also, of course, a watch. When I return home, I step on my Withings smart scale, which syncs my daily weight fluctuations with other health apps.

Post shower and dress, I clip on an OrCam, ever-present smart camera that tracks the faces of everyone I meet in the day. It’s helpful since I have a hard time remembering names. I head to the kitchen and ask my HomePod smart speaker to continue the playlist that I started on my run. I grab a breakfast bar, and scan the barcode on the packaging with the MyFitnessPal app, which not only tracks the calories I intake, it also adjusts requirements based on the calories I burned on my run and daily weight. My wife shows me what we were up to this time a year ago via TimeHop, an automatic and personalized “this day in history” tracker. When the last person in my family leaves the house, our Nest smart thermostat will turn down the HVAC to save energy, and any stray smart lights in the house will deluminate.

The Waze traffic application informs me of a car collision and suggests a custom route circumnavigating the accident. I swing by Starbucks en route to work and pay with a QR code on the watch connected to my Starbucks account, which in turn, is connected to my ApplePay account. As I sit in the drive-through, I call into a Zoom Telepresence meeting with Europe. I bid them good evening. The meeting notes are automatically dictated via an AI virtual assistant called Voicea. I pull into my office parking garage where open spaces are illuminated with a faint green light, occupied spots glow red. I wander to my office and enter the building whose entrance is controlled via security turn-styles, that let me in based on an NFC chip embedded into my employee badge. My phone alerts that a package arrived at my front door, complete with a photograph of the delivery worker compliments of my Ring smart doorbell and camera.

I go for lunch at a local fast casual chain restaurant and ordered a salad on the touchscreen at the table. After the meal, I tap my watch to the face of the tablet, paying at the table with in inbuilt NFC, and drive home. At home, I pack my bag, and throw in a Tile device which lets me track my luggage from anywhere. I ask my AI assistant Siri to order me a Lyft to the airport. At the airport I check my luggage, and tap my fingerprints on a biometric and facial scanner called Clear. This lets me skip the first half of the security line. I’m early for my flight so I head to the airport’s Delta lounge. The Clear account is also connected to my lounge account, so again I press my fingers to the plate to gain access and walk inside.

Just as I get comfortable, a tide of terror rises in my stomach, compelling me to check my iPhone. OK, my front door is locked according to my August Smart Door Lock app. I press the lock button anyway to calm my nerves, just in case. While I’m at it, I use BMW Connected app to ensure my car doors are locked, too. At boarding time, since my digital boarding pass is connected to my smart watch via Wallet, I simply scan my watch to board the plane. I haven’t used a paper ticket in years. Taking my seat, I make myself comfortable and press the attendant button by the seat, and he brings me a water. Is the button IoT, I wonder? I check the status of my Tile, and see that the luggage made it onto the plane as well. Before takeoff, I video chat with my kids on FaceTime, and just for fun turn on augmented reality mode so that my face looks like a puppy, to their amusement. We bid adieu and the plane takes off. I dig my Oculus Quest VR goggles from my carry on bag, slip it over my head. I’m instantly transported from a sardine can in the sky with 32” legroom to a wide open virtual world where I relax and catch virtual fish. For a lifelong claustrophobe like me, this is heaven. I doze off, entranced by the gentle calls of virtual bullfrogs, crickets, and wind rusting in the trees.

The devices illustrated above are not fiction (although the dense usage in a single 12 hour period was marginally contrived). All of the IoT mentioned are in current use by my household. We are not particularly gadget-crazed, either, yet still count the devices that we use in 2020 in the dozens, up from perhaps a smart phone and some apps a decade earlier. Futurist Kevin Kelly’s prediction seems to be coming true: In the future, “ninety percent of your coworkers will be unseen machines. Most of what you do will not be possible without them. And there will be a blurry line between what you do and what they do.” The Internet of Things are here, today, and pervasive.

Internet of What Now?

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” — Arthur C. Clark

Understanding the Internet of Things (IoT) is like learning the game of Go. The rules are simple, but grow deeper and more complex as you learn. IoT are (usually) digital devices that connect to the Internet (generally), but the Devil is in the parentheticals, since many definitions of IoT include technically correct devices like smart phones and technically incorrect passive objects like radio frequency ID (RFID) tags that live inside your passport. And if we include smart phones, why not tablets which are basically large smart phones, and if tablets why not laptops, or desktops? And if we included RFID, why not QR codes, which also require external sensors to be useful? Where does it end? Rather than concern ourselves with a definition of IoT, it’s prudent to consider the Internet of Things as a paradigm. We’re in the IoT age. IoT is, at its core, a movement to extend the use of technology to sense and act in the real world, leveraging network infrastructure (from wifi to the cloud) to share data. IoT is a modern Grand Unified Theory of electronics and computation.

I first ran across the concept of the Internet of Things at a global tinkering event called Maker Faire in 2009. Makers is the self-applied moniker to electronics-focused hobbyists, living in the cross section of open source (freely available tools and documentation) and cheap, available electronics. Makers, as a group, are the very definition of non-expert early adopters, building intelligence into objects like Internet-connected Coke machines or light-up hats, for personal utility or artistic expression. IoT basically achieves the same thing as the devices that Maker’s build: make dumb things smart.

It would be a stretch to proclaim that Makers are the driving force behind IoT, they are a particular intonation of the zeitgeist prevalent in the early 21st century. The drivers of Makers and IoT engineers are similar, however: the commoditization and standardization of cheap electronics at scale, the web lowering the bar of expertise for creating new devices from these electronics, and a readily available network infrastructures. These have prepared the fertile ground in which IoT flourishes. Installed IoT units jumped from around 5 billion in 2016, to 10 billion in 2018, to 22 billion in 2020, or about 2.5 devices per human on earth. Despite these numbers, IoT is still an inchoate industry. As this growth rate continues, we could see well over half a trillion units by 2030, or around 75 IoT devices for every person.

IoT is bridging the gap between the first and second machine ages. Putting intelligence into our physical world via IoT is the ground game for gathering together the powers of the mechanical muscles of last century and the digital brains of this one. Consider the Michigan Micro Mote, a computer that fits on a grain of rice measuring 2x2x4mm and powered by solar cell. In a world like this, most anything can be made “smart”.

IoT polymath Bruce Sinclair once said that the world does not want a better mousetrap, customers want a pest-free environment. People care about outcomes not products. Successful IoT leverages technology to achieve better outcomes, while failed attempts try to tie in technology while lacking clear benefits. The value proposition of smart thermostats are clear (saving energy and thus money), while digital bottles that display the liquid contents are not so obvious compared to transparent glass. So in order to understand the IoT world, we’ll focus on the big outcomes we want starting at the micro level and working up to the macro: from personal IoT devices called wearables, to smart homes, up toward an interconnected smart industry, smart cities, smart world, and beyond.

Wearables, Health

Wearables are a category of Internet of Things, where you are the “thing” being “interneted”. You can wear smart watches on your wrist, smart pendants on your neck, clothing via smart fabrics, shoes, glasses, earplugs, as well as clip-able devices from pedometers to cameras and microphones. The purpose of many wearable devices are tracking steps, heart rate, blood oxygen levels, collected by enthusiasts who call their measurement methods the quantitative self. The biggest market for wearables today is in the consumer health market, but many off the shelf wearables are growing into spaces generally dominated for medical devices, such as tracking irregular heart fibrillation or blood sugar.

The most common general purpose wearable that your average consumer uses using are smart watches like Apple Watch, Samsung Gear, and Fitbit. The watch is a form factor that people are already familiar with, and the bulky size allows space for loads of embedded electronics and a good sized battery. Outside of the health sensor market, smart watches are also extensions of smart phones, complete with smaller version of apps. During the COVID pandemic, some smart watch apps were put to use to promote social distancing by buzzing if two or more people came within a 6 foot radius.

Amber Case, author and researcher into non-intrusive (Calm) technology once claimed that we are the first generation of cyborgs (a portmanteau of “cybernetic organisms”). Cyborgs happen when there is a seamless harmony between living creatures and technology, and the technology starts to occupy a place in your mind similar to limbs and tools in the hands of an expert. Since a majority of humans started to carry and interact regularly with smart phones, we are all cyborgs now. It’s only becoming more intimate with newer IoT. There’s an emerging subspecialty of wearables we could call ingestables. Ankon Medical Technologies created a camera pill to get a look and measurements inside of a human body, and a company called Three Square Market made headlines by microchipping 40 employee volunteers who can use implants as their ID badges for work and make purchases. This more extreme form of quantitative self enthusiasts that exists in the cross section of Makers and body modification subculture are called biohackers, who implant devices such as microchips and sensors under their skin. As bizarre as this may feel to us in the early 21st century, by the 22nd this kind of modification may be as mainstream as earring piercings.

Wearables are an endless subspecialty that could easily fill a book. From personal GPS trackers to LoJack your kids or your pets, to a frog baby monitor my wife and I attached to your sleeping infant to warn for SIDS. There are smart bike helmet, sleep and posture monitors, to bionic legs with surgically infused neural interface allowing patients to feel sensations of walking impact and bending a knee. Many of these wearables are connected through smartphones, and share data through common platforms like Apple HealthKit, Google Health, or Nike+.

Smart Homes

My first unequivocal home IoT device was the Amazon button. Shortly after our first daughter was born, my wife and I found ourselves ordering many diapers and baby wipes. These buttons were connected through our Amazon account, and our home wifi to the internet, and placed near the baby changing station. As we ran low of either item, we would push the button. Within a day, we’d receive a fresh shipment of baby accoutrements. It was a literal “easy button”.

Connected smart homes are often the first experience people have with IoT devices. Whether that means an Amazon Alexa voice operated device, or a Nest smart thermostat, or Ring video doorbell unit, an increasing number of consumers are opting to simplify some aspect of their lives with smart IoT devices in the home. Americans are saving well over $100M per year with smart thermostats as of 2020. Smart security systems are driving down the price and increasing accessibility of top notch, high definition security cameras and equipment.

Many of these devices are connected through centralized platforms, such as Google Nest, Apple HomeKit, Amazon Alexa to interoperate together in a common ecosystem. These platforms are commonly fronted by voice controlled chatbots, triggered by an branded wake word like “Alexa” or “Hey Google”, and followed by a verbal command converted internally to text via natural language processing (NLP). It’s their wide range of functionality that accounts for their recent rise in popularity. When I tell my Apple HopePod “Hey Siri, Goodnight” it turns off the downstairs lamps and TV, turns on my bedroom smart lights at 25% luminosity, and locks all external smart locks.

Like wearables, the smart home revolution is expansive. The examples are endless with more every day: Eve aqua home water controller, Athena IoT security cameras, iBaby baby monitors. In the bathroom there’s the Ayi smart mirror, Kohler’s Moxie shower head with speakers, and Withings smart scale that tracks daily fluctuations and calculated BMI. In the kitchen there’s the Samsung smart fridge and Tovala smart oven, and for we budding chefs the Chopbox smart cutting board w/ scale and SmartyPans, which tracks weight and temperature for optimized cooking with an app that makes suggestions.

Industrial IoT (IIoT), Manufacturing, Logistics, Retail

GE’s Chief Economist Marco Annunziata has said that the Industrial Internet brings together “intelligent machines, advanced analytics, and the creativity of people at work. It’s the marriage of minds and machines”. There is a growing Industrial IoT (IIoT) sector focused on improving areas as diverse as manufacturing and logistics, to agriculture and military. Following an estimated growth rate of approximately 30%, IIoT market may be worth $14 Trillion from 2020 to 2030.

An easy place to envision the value of IIoT is in the manufacture of goods. Large machines used to create products at scale are expensive to buy and maintain, and unexpected breakdowns can cause myriad of downstream problems from downtime and late orders to poor quality output. Machine health, sometimes measured as Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) is an easy domain for IIoT, where attached sensors provide various metrics on each machine. Providing measurements about, for example, the heat of a device falling outside of an acceptable range can providing information for maintenance crews to be more reactive to breakdowns by tapping temperature data logs. Over time though, these devices can become smarter and begin alerting operations teams to more preventative measures, and eventually proactively, predictively, and finally prescriptively solving breakdowns before they occur.

Between the factory floor to the retail floor, IIoT is also finding a perfect home in supply chains. Historically starved of data and run by calendars and paper documents, global logistics are improving with realtime tracking of orders. The ability to follow individual shipping containers with GPS in realtime across the open ocean between docks is helping enterprises track orders with more fidelity, lead by providers like Maersk. Taking this further, companies like CargoSense provide IIoT devices that anyone can add to their shipments. These devices can collect metrics like temperature and moisture levels and report if they stay within expected levels, or digital seals to validate that cargo was not tampered with. Devices in logistics can help ensure quality, security, and compliance.

Due to their relatively low cost at scale, IIoT devices can be placed anywhere they’re needed. They can act as auxiliary security by monitoring warehouses grounds at night with hyper-spectral cameras, provide early flood prediction by detecting ground moisture, or alert management to an empty break-room snack machine. The CalAmp and Pallet Alliance IoT wooden pallets can offer logistics transparency for low cost and without fundamental changing existing processes.

While the shipment of orders in bulk is helpful, many corporations want to track inventory at the item level, from ensuring drugs are authentic, to validating sneakers end up where expected. Technologies like radio frequency identification (RFID) unlock individual item tracing from production all the way to retail. RFID, being a passive sensor, may push the definition of IoT, but it’s one of several examples that are a major part of the IIoT ecosystem, alongside near-field communication (NFC) devices and QR codes, for interacting with items via smart phone. This interaction can take the form of getting more information about an individual item. Pair these tags with RFly, an RFID scanning drone by MIT Media Lab, and you have daily or even hourly cycle counting at the cost of an off-the-shelf drone and some IoT devices.

Finally, in the retail space, POS systems are getting the gong. Consumers are able to make payments from mobile phones via NFC systems like Apple or Samsung Pay, and retail workers are replacing large POS systems with handheld scanners and mobile CC Square units. For larger baskets like grocery stores, Caper Carts smart carts scan items for checkout as you place them into the basket. But even these are stopgap measures as outfits transition to more flexible self-service shopping systems, like the entirely touchless camera based system of Amazon Go which we’ll revisit soon.For now, from retail, let’s venture into the greater world of cities.

Smart Cities, Smart Grids, Smart World

Unlike most social human endeavors, like nations or corporations, cities rarely die. Even Hiroshima, once decimated by a nuclear strike, is again a thriving city. Geoffrey West, researcher in complexity science and cofounder of the august Santa Fe Institute, succinctly explained why: “Adaptation, not equilibrium is the rule.” Cities are powerful because they are complex adaptive systems. Up until now, most of that adaptation has been driven by human intelligence and labor. Now we have a new kind of adaptive component. Projects that leverage IoT at scale to reduce costs, improve sustainability and aspects of city life are called Smart Cities, and account for nearly a quarter of all IoT projects. Smart Cities aren’t necessarily planned cities like Masdar in Abu Dhabi, but instead, add IoT devices to improve critical systems like transportation, energy consumption, and safety. One of the first smart cities was the retrofitted ancient city of Seoul, Korea.

Smart cities follow three phases of maturity. The First Phase is all about improving isolated operations in the city like traffic, environment and culture. The Second Phase is about vertically integrating services to improve processes via IoT, like how Palo Alto outfitted its traffic lights with an artificial intelligence mesh network, allowing them to coordinate according to shifting traffic patterns. The Third Phase integrates the vertical systems providing holistic improvements across various service areas. While cities will grow at different rates, it’s difficult if not impossible to jump phases.

In the US and other countries, the general design of electrical transmission is through a brittle collection of localized power generation and usage. The primary power generators in the world in 2019 are still coal burning plants, but are also major contributors to global climate change. While only a few locations in the world have mineable coal, it can be transported virtually anywhere to be burned, and thus provide local power generation. On the other hand, low carbon footprint renewable energies like geothermal, solar, and wind can only be generated in certain places. The energy itself must be transported elsewhere, which is historically difficult to do. In short, if we’re ever to see a majority of renewable energy a smart grid is required, which will rely heavily on IoT to track, manage, and transport electricity in an optimal and even predictive way. GE is a leader in this field through the Industrial Internet Consortium and massive investments in IIoT for generators like windmills and smart grid tech. Beyond the transportation of energy, cities can be outfitted to use less electricity. Like the Nest for smart homes, we can optimize energy use at the corporate, city, and national level. This is a key need for a sustainable circular economy.

If we zoom out from smart areas (like cities), to smart networks (like grids), we eventually reach the point where we want to be smarter about the world in general. There’s the obvious extension of grid and city tech across international boarders, which is simply a matter of scale, but more than that, there’s a need to collect and share knowledge of the global ecosystem as a whole. The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) lead John Waterston is leading a project called the Ocean of Things. In the next few years the project aims to drop 50,000 IoT sensors into the world’s oceans, with more planned for the future. Considering that more of the surface of the Earth is covered in water than land, this will give humanity a huge boost in knowledge about our own planet. As for the terrestrial, the company FGR has built a solar powered IoT and data communications systems to monitor phosphate mines dangerous remote desert regions. These devices are outfitted with temperature, moisture and pressure gauges, and this data is funneled into a cloud system and paired with ambient sources like weather data compliments of Cumulocity IoT. With more robust tracking the system can increase the availability of fertilizer and help stabilize global food crops, with the help of IoT devices deployed to track the state of industrial farms.

Combinatorial Creativity and Ubiquitous Computing

“We must always change, renew, rejuvenate ourselves; otherwise, we harden.” — J. W. van Goethe

A shady looking man slinks into a store, eyes darting around, slipping objects off of the shelf into some dark recesses of his trench coat. He sidles to the exit. A security guard yells to the man, smiles, and informs him that he’s forgotten his receipt. This scene was from an IBM commercial in the 90s. Now it exists, as predicted, in the form of Amazon Go, a concept store in Seattle where users link their Amazon account upon entering. When a consumer grabs items off the shelf and exits with their bounty, their Amazon account is charged. No checkout lane, no human interaction. I tested the limits of this store by attempting to confuse it through a combination of moving items around, to slipping items into my jacket, to exiting and reentering multiple times. No dice. It’s holy grail of retail shopping: correct, frictionless and instant.

Amazon didn’t create any new class of technologies to implement Go. It’s a handful of off-the-shelf components like cameras, 2D codes, other sensors, and lots of AI. The ability to create something new from a collection of new yet accessible technologies is called Deep Tech (as opposed to more mainstream High Tech, or just Tech). The next decade will see a Cambrian Explosion of new technological uses thanks to IoT. It only requires a handful of components and the combinatorial creativity to put a subset of them to use in novel combinations.

Utility being the mother of invention, some of the best IoT projects exists to clone expensive capabilities. Professor and inventor Joshua Siegel created an IoT device called Carduino, leveraging car and smartphone sensors to track car health telematics. It can be programmed to use an accelerometer to track tire pressure, or roll up the car windows if it detects rain. Or simply let you remote start the car over the internet. Many of these features are built into modern cars, these clever hacks can retrofit old cars for tens of dollars. Another example, born of a shortage of supplies during the Coronavirus pandemic forced creativity on several fronts. One of those was the creation of an open source ventilator by Rice University dubbed the Apollo BVM. It was buildable for around $200 US with off the shelf actuators controlled a couple IoT platforms called Arduino, held together by some 3D printed parts.

Beyond the devices themselves, there’s a bright future in the processing and selling data that IoT collects. FitBit Inspire is a wearable ostensibly for promoting a healthy lifestyle through tracking quantitative self metrics, with a side-gig of selling your data to health insurance plans in exchange for lower rates. Of course for ethical and legal reasons it’s important to inform consumers of these plans.

Through this burst of combinatorial creativity, we can work toward a world long envisioned by science fiction writers called ubiquitous computing. The concept being, that once we live our lives surrounded by smart objects capable of measuring and acting upon their environment, and sharing that information with each other, humans can effortlessly interact with their world without consciously or specifically executing commands to a particular device. Rather than picking up a “remote control” to turn “on” a “television” and changing to a “channel” to see a particular “show”, in a world of voice activation, cheap smart walls, and AI assistants, you can walk into any room and ask “what’s going on in Bali today?” and get video and stats live streaming on the closest relevant device capable of relaying the information, be it on a wall or on smart glasses. When computing devices fade away into the background, no longer fighting for attention, we’ve reached a state of technology design called Calm tech.

But before we can hope to live in a world of ubiquitous computing, we first need to build the technologies. To do that, let’s cover the technical basics.

Technology

The Internet of Things is a loose collection of banal technologies which you’d be forgiven an urge to neglect. They lack the sex appeal of artificial intelligence, or the promised social disruption of blockchain or autonomous vehicles. The most seductive thing that can be said about IoT parallels Willie Sutton’s answer when asked why he robbed banks (“Because that’s where the money is”): IoT is where the data is. More than any other deep technology available today, IoT is already innovating how we live and work, and quietly rewriting the rules of industrial operations as a major player in what’s being called Industry 4.0, because it turns out that the Information Age really is all about the data.

The distinction between smartwatches, smartphones, tablets, laptops is a matter of degree, one where we can arbitrarily draw lines for marketing purposes. It’s a conceptual rallying point based on purpose. Is a smart watch a general purpose or specialty device? It probably depends on how smart, and even then the lines blur. To channel Descartes, at what point does a laptop become a desktop, and a desktop become a server? Industrial IoT devices are very much just little computers with industrial quality sensors attached. Cloud computers, too, are a valuable component of IoT infrastructure, as well as anything run on or accessible to them, from AI, to blockchain, to quantum computers. Wearables like smart watches fit the definition of IoT, but so too do virtual and augmented reality devices. Autonomous vehicles are basically just multiple IoT devices on wheels. While many of the technologies named in this paragraph are not IoT per se, IoT is where they all come together, like a cocktail party, to mix and mingle..

To understand why IoT plays such a central role is to understand their general purpose nature. If we attempted to list the myriad ways in which IoT could be put to use, an exhaustive list of potential use-cases, we’d never finish. Instead, let’s keep things high level by dividing the Internet of Things into two major components: Internet and Things. These are the lexical components of IoT.

The Internet

“The rich are different from you and me,” claimed F. Scott Fitzgerald. “Yes,” Earnest Hemingway replied, “they have more money.” An amusing point belies the complexity of the difference. The same can be said for the Internet of Things: they’re like normal things, they also just have the internet. But that distinction hardly suffices in the vast gulf between things that have the internet, and things that don’t. We’ll cover how things are “interneted” in this section.

The idea of transmitting data between electronic devices is an old one, predated by nearly a century with Samuel Morse’s telegraph and its alphanumeric encoding of dits and dahs. By modern standards, memorizing Morse code and tapping out long sentences feels tedious, but it beat the Pony Express in terms of speed. The Internet eventually allowed a network of research computers to transmit files with a series of 1s and 0s, encoding signals much more powerfully than Morse. The first Internet message was sent over a half decade ago with the simple message LO (they attempted to type LOGIN, but the server crashed part way through). Today, IoT devices leverage this original network protocol for uses as varied as streaming realtime data about foot pressure on a shoe, to remotely reserving a taxi to your precise location without speaking to a human. It turns out, the protocol was so general, it’s still in use today, and continues to be leveraged in unexpected ways. It’s worth looking into what makes the internet so powerful by diving into its constituent parts: a network layers and topologies, upon which are built flexibility to power IoT.

ISO 7 layers

The fundamental structure of the Internet and much of its power lay in its protocols. The Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model describe seven layers to a network: physical, data link, network, transport, session, presentation, and application. With these layers, you can design any kind of encoded transmission network, from transferring images between phones via bluetooth, to Voice Over IP (VOIP). The trick is getting others to agree to your proposals, but for our purposes we’ll concern ourselves with mainstream and emerging standards.

This section is going to be dense and fast, but it’s worth going over the layers to get a sense of how a network is built to be deeply integrated, and how a smart thermostat connected through Bluetooth can be part of the same internet as a smartphone connected to a cell tower.

It all starts with physics. Whether this first layer is wired or wireless, we need to physically transport some symbols from one place to another. A symbol in this case is a wave function of electrons, photons, or some other physical process like radio waves. These waves pulse high and low, representing 1s and 1s (a.k.a. binary digits, or bits), over the Physical medium. This is leveraged by the second layer, called Data Link, which uses the physical transmission medium to reliably bundle up symbols into a data frame, and move them over the network between two devices.

The third layer is how we support more than two devices. It starts with the Network layer, where multiple devices (also known as nodes) and networks are connected to each other, and how packets of data route between them. This layer is also what defines our ability to find other computers on the network, like with Internet Protocol (or IP) addresses.This layer is, for example, what lets your iPhone connected to a cell tower eventually connect to Netflix.

Now that we have a multi-node network, we need to reliably send data across that network in a standard way. Layer four is the Transport layer, responsible for ensuring that segments of data are reliably transmitted to each other across the network. The internet that we generally think of, with web pages and streaming videos, largely uses the Transmission Control Protocol (or TCP) for its transport layer implementation. The internet is largely defined by layers three and four, and the protocol is often simply shortened to be TCP/IP (though other protocols certainly exist). This is a good example of how several OSI layers can be so tightly linked the blur together.

Next is where networks get really interesting. With the physical ability to transmit bits, and the ability to route those bits in a meaningful and reliable way to another device potentially found on the other side of the globe, the top layers are what start to give meaning to these ones and zeroes zipping around.Layer five is the Session layer, chalk full of technical geekery, but in essence allows you to have long-running, continuous transmissions between nodes, like a phone call. Layer six is the Presentation or syntax layer, which is what gives meaning to all of the blocks of data we’ve been keeping as binary digits. The presentation layer is what defines a string of bits to be an image, a video, or an emoji. The final top layer, the seventh Application layer, is where the user interacts with the network. Up until now everything has been about encoding, transmission and reliability of bits rushing around the world from device to device. The application layer is where we might view a webpage using the hypertext transport protocol (or more commonly known as HTTP), or log into a remote command line via secure shell (SSH). Layers one through six are made for computers, layer seven is made for us (and also computers).

There are more than the layers of the network to consider. We have to think about how nodes are laid out as network topologies (peer-to-peer, star, mesh), consistency vs availability vs latency tradeoffs, risk concerns like protocol popularity, chattiness vs battery drain, and conceptual concerns like openness. The answers to these considerations are represented by a veritable zoo of protocols.

Network Hierarchies and Topologies

While the OSI layers are a generalization of the components involved in building a robust data network, we need to know a bit more before we dive into exactly which IoT network protocols are useful for our needs. One is an understanding of how our devices are configured to communicate with one another, also known as the network topology. Does our smart thermostat connect to a smart home hub alongside my other home devices, or do they connect with each other in a mesh? Does my smart watch have an LTE chip allowing it to connect directly to the nearest cell tower, or does it use bluetooth to connect to my smartphone which in turn provides internet services via the tower? Answers to these kinds of questions are driven by the user experience you want to provide, and then, will drive the sort of networking protocols you need to support.

Another piece of the puzzle is understanding the range that you need your devices to operate in. An industrial data collection device on a mill machine need only communicate within the four walls of the factory that houses it. Meanwhile an arctic barometric device may need to send readings to a base-station several miles away, or perhaps even to an Earth-orbiting satellite. Luckily for us, there’s a well understood hierarchy of IoT network types, based on the range or wireless communication.

The smallest range is the Nanonetwork, which is the communication of microscopic electronic elements over millimeter ranges. The next level higher are the kind of Near-Field Communication (NFC) that are how touchless cards unlock hotel rooms, or how your phone communicates via Samsung or Apple Pay. Then there are Body Area Networks (BAN) for wearables and Personal Area Networks (PAN) for your immediate workspace, such as your bluetooth mouse at work. Next up are the more common Local Area Network (LAN), often wifi connected devices like smart TVs in your home or laptops at work. Broader still are Campus Area Networks (CAN), Municipal Area Networks (MAN), and finally Wide Area Networks (WAN) such as the globally connected internet.

A question every IoT device maker needs to ask is: “how broadly does my device need to communicate?” An Apple Watch may only need bluetooth to connect to a smartphone as a PAN, while smart parking garage tracking devices could be connected via LAN or CAN.

With ISO and hierarchies covered, let’s take a break from the dense concepts and technical jargon, and look at a few examples of IoT-focused network protocols in use today, their strengths and weaknesses.

Wireless Protocol Suites

“When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole. We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. Not only this, but through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be able to do his will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket.” — Nikola Tesla, 1926

There’s a relationship between power consumption and network traffic. The general rule is, the larger the volume of data transmitted, the more power consumed. Think of a shovel for dirt. A big shovel holds more dirt per motion, but also requires much more strength to lift it. But a small shovel used rapidly is also exhausting. You can’t circumvent the fact that the more dirt you move, the more energy is required, but you can design shovels that are optimized for certain jobs. In wireless electronics, balancing energy consumption and data transmission is an endless struggle. There are several competing low power wireless transmission standards vying for supremacy in the IoT space, corresponding to different layers of the OSI model.

The name of the infrastructure protocol IPv6 over Low power Wireless Personal Area Networks (or 6LoWPAN) is an example of the dense technical considerations when choosing an IoT protocol. Or consider the following three protocols: SigFox, WiMax, or WirelessHART. It you are not a student of IoT networking, you’ve likely never heard of them. Compare the previous three with the following mainstream standards like Wifi, 5G, or BLE (Bluetooth Low Engery). You’ve likely heard of them.

The tradeoffs in choosing a protocol flex between cutting edge, technical considerations, and widely adopted standards. Do you need to leverage a proprietary standard like Z-Wave, semi-open like ZigBee, or completely open like Thread (6LoWPAN + TCP/IP hybrid)?

Like TCP/IP, many of these standards sprawl across several ISO layers, making direct comparisons awkward. But a useful rule of thumb is to start with network range requirements (near field, wide area). From there, aim for the most mainstream protocols (NFC, wifi), unless there’s a technical reason (power usage, data rate, range, etc.) to land on a less common network (Neul, LoRaWAN). Next, bias toward open protocols, unless there’s a business or technical reason why a proprietary protocol better fits your needs (Thread or ZigBee).

While IoT is often described in terms of the physical devices themselves, it’s important to note that the complexity of connecting those devices to the internet is a substantial portion of IoT considerations. As a friend in the IoT space is fond of saying: “there are no cell towers in the ocean.” Choosing how to connect IoT to the internet is often a decision made for us based on circumstances. The complexity is in understanding the options and decision criteria, many breakdowns can be found online. For our purposes, let’s move onto the other half of IoT: The Things.

The Things

“All parts should go together without forcing. You must remember that the parts you are reassembling were disassembled by you. Therefore, if you can’t get them together again, there must be a reason. By all means, do not use a hammer.” — IBM Manual, 1925

There are may ways to break apart the physical components that make up “things” in the IoT world, but a focus on the following three can a useful division: Transducers, computers, and power supplies. Each of the three contain deeper constituent parts, but in practice these three are good bailiwicks of concern.

Transducers: Sensors and Actuators

Transducers come in two flavors: sensors and actuators. Sensors, as their namesake implies, sense the world around them. Your nerves are sensors converting various signals into impulses that your brain can understand, such as light into color, or heat into feeling. Digital sensors act in much the same way, but rather convert analog signals to digital codes understandable by a computer.

The Apple Watch series 5, a popular smart watch in last 2019, packs in a handful of analog and digital sensors: compass, global navigation, altimeter, electrical and optical heart sensors, accelerometer, gyroscope, ambient light sensor, microphone, and pressure sensor. Most of these sensors are small combination chips, like the compass, accelerometer, and gyroscope. Or a single chip supports multiple standards, like global navigation that works with GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, and QZSS. A common use of IoT devices are simply to collect data, from weather sensors to a home smart scale. The active ingredients of these kinds of devices are mainly sensors connected to the internet.

Actuators are in many ways the opposite of sensors. While sensors are responsible for inputs into the computer, actuators are how a computing device interacts with the outside world. Or in other terms, sensors are for inputs and actuators are for outputs. In our Apple Watch example, actuators would be the watch’s speaker, OLED display, and haptic feedback system. Fewer IoT devices exist as actuators alone. Even the simplest IoT device, like a smart TV, is more than a screen, and contains IR/RF readers for remote controls, and commonly ambient light sensors to dim in the dark.

Computers, Storage and Communication

The guts of IoT devices are just tiny computers. Boring old little computers, made up of microprocessors for computation, memory like RAM, longer term storage like NAND flash, and data transmission like a WiFi shield. Not all of these parts are necessary, but they’re common for an IoT computer. What makes most IoT computer hardware interesting is that designers and manufacturers have shrunk them to unfathomable sizes, reduced power consumption dramatically, and sold devices at scale for stupefyingly low prices.

The needs for IoT computers are so common, they’re sold as platforms for targeted use-cases. For example, Arduino is the grand-daddy of open microcontrollers, while Raspberry PI is a more full-fledged computer running an operating system and various on-board components. These are also known as a system on a chip (SoC). While you’d use an Arduino for managing a collection of transducers for simple inputs and outputs at low power, a Raspberry Pi is more suitable for more complex processing, such as a running an AI for processing images collected by a connected camera.

The Apple Watch contains an S5 chip with a 64-bit dual-core processor and W3 chips. Between the two, in addition to computation, they are also responsible for wireless data transmission, supporting cellular phone calls (LTE and UMTS3), Wi-Fi (802.11b/g/n 2.4GHz), BLE (Bluetooth 5.0), and NFC for Apple Pay. Whether an IoT device heavily leverages sensors to read the world or actuators to interact with it, one component all IoT devices have is a microcontroller. Even passive RFID tags contain a chip for the simplest processing.

Power Supply: We Mean Batteries

Batteries are huge, heavy, and slow to improve relative to other computing components like CPUs. Most of the tradeoffs you’ll make when building IoT devices are related to shrinking power consumption, and therefore, battery size and charging requirements. The tradeoffs are endless and frustrating, from slower on-board computation, shorter wireless data transfer range, less frequent sensor reading, or simply removing components.

Unlike Moore’s Law which double microchip transistors every two years or so, battery technology capacity tends to only double every 20 years. Nowhere is this more apparent than by tearing down a smartphone. Once you remove the casing and display, you’ll find that most of the innards comprise of battery with tiny adjacent computers and sensors, accounting for their increased battery life over the years.

We don’t need to be experts in Kirchoff’s circuit laws to consider the high-level business tradeoffs between what data we need to transfer at a minimum, how small we need the devices to be, and how long we want the device to last between charges. But some companies are getting creative. Wiliot is a company building Bluetooth chips powered by batteries. But these batteries are charged by harvesting ambient radiation like Wifi or FM radio. In theory, they can run endlessly, as long as there’s some radiation nearby. The concept is not dissimilar from solar panels, these just operate without sunlight.

It’s really cleverness and creativity that has allowed the industry make power improvements despite the shortcomings of batteries. But these aren’t the only problems encountering IoT devices.

Lingering Problems

Compared to many other emerging technologies like blockchain or quantum computing, IoT has few downsides or existential threats on its future. But nothing is perfect, and there are still structural concerns that need addressed as we roll this new tech out.

Confidence

Do you ever forget to drink water? Consider HidrateSpark, a smart water bottle that “glows to make sure that you never forget to drink your water again,” apparently preparing for a world where humans have lost their sense of thirst. What about Smalt, the Internet connected salt shaker, or Toasteroid, to burn an image into your toast via a connected mobile app? How about Flatev, the Keurig-like machine that converts pods of dough into instant tortillas? We could go on. A unique story of trolling from the Consumer Electronics Symposium (CES) in 2020 was an IoT potato. It didn’t actually do anything at all, it was merely a potato with an antenna sticking out of it, but it still had a line of gawkers curious about what it could do, acting as exhibit A that IoT can easily jump the shark.

Emerging technologies always have a precarious path to mass adoption, and a deluge of bad ideas can stall public confidence away from genuinely useful devices. And while it seems doubtful that any of these are a threat to eventual IoT adoption, a lack of creativity can sour customers and corporations away from valuable ideas and delay years of real benefit.

Internet Availability

Without the internet, computerized things are only a fraction as useful. Although improving by the year, ubiquitous network access are far from a solved problem. We need a collection of network options which support wider areas, lower power, higher availability, lower cost, and all of the other incremental improvements we expect from technology. Happily, a few projects are working to build the networks of the future.

Project Loon from Alphabet’s Google X division is focused on releasing sub-orbital balloons, high in Earth’s atmosphere on the boarder of space, which provide internet access to underserved communities in remote regions around the globe. Not to be outdone, Facebook Aquila has similar aspirations with solar powered drones in continuous flight. For a more open network, Project OWL (Organization, Whereabouts, and Logistics), sponsored by the open source Linux Foundation, creates a mesh network of IoT devices called DuckLinks. OWL is designed to deploy networks quickly in disaster scenarios, but it can potentially play a more permanent role. Through these, along with a handful of satellite internet initiatives, every corner of the earth may have some form of network access in a generation. Pair these with the relentless push by cell providers into higher bandwidth 5G, the future is trending toward higher speed and more consistently available internet, which only increases the mobility of IoT devices, untethering them from homes and smartphones.

Energy

Energy: the voracious vampire sapping vigor from many promising projects. Google Glass only survived around an hour of moderate continuous use. Tile, while great, still requires me to remember to change the battery to find my luggage. Many in the industry rank power supply as a top concern in IoT product design.

Wireless power transfer has been attempted for over 100 years, and was a particular obsession of the great electrical pioneer, Nikola Tesla. While there have been some improvements in wireless transmission of power within close contact, such as the Qi standard supported by most modern smartphones, longer range wireless power transfer eludes us. uBeam and Energous are two famous attempts, but we shouldn’t be hard on the myriad of imperfections in their approaches. MIT has made some recent process with power over WiFi, but for now, motion energy transfer, is a more practical option.

For now, the best we can do is find ways to require less power, or harvest power from the ambient environment. JBL recently released low power headphones, so low in fact, that they can be charged with minimal solar. Taking one step further, researchers at the University of Waterloo created a battery-free remote input device called Tip-Tap, which you wear on your fingers like a glove. Automatic watches have been self winding for centuries, converting movement into potential energy through winding a spring. Smart shoes from companies like SolePower collect electricity from merely walking. Pair these technologies with improvements made by, for example, IBM Research’s Battery Lab’s new experiments in battery elements extracted from seawater, and in a few decades we may have this battery problem licked.

eWaste

Famed Russian writer Anton Chekhov once observed, “Only entropy comes easy”. The aging of IoT devices will not resemble the slick veneer of 50s futurism. The ships of time will discard an endless jetsam of corrosion, part Star Wars Tatooine, part Jetsons. We call this refuse e-waste. Beyond the visual blight, many electronics and batteries contain rare earth metals, as well as volatile and carcinogenic chemicals that poison animals (including humans), soil, water, and eventually Earth’s food supply.To avoid a future where we’re all wading through electronic trash heaps, we have a few things to solve. Luckily, any kid growing up in the middle of the 20th century has known the answer for decades: reduce, reuse, recycle.

First in line is reducing how many IoT devices we use. That means balancing how many physical things we need against how many things we want do. Rather than buying a handful of devices to detect moisture levels in your basement, another detecting temperature, and another detecting movement, you’d be better off with a single device that can do all three. The benefit to the consumer, beyond less waste, is that multi-use devices cost less overall, and require changing batteries less often. The easiest example of a single popular multi-use devices is a smartphone (which helps explain why so many other single-use personal devices have had a more difficult time taking off).

The next focus should be on reusing the IoT devices that we have. There are many programs for sending gently used electronics that are still useful to other, such as Portland’s Free Geek program. Beyond giving electronics a second life and thus reducing waste, they also provide electronics to underserved communities who may have a harder time taking part in the IoT revolution.

The last solution to dealing with eWaste is to recycle or reclaim the materials present. Many of the rare earth metals are of limited supply, and can be extracted and reused in new component manufacturing. Some cannot, but should be reclaimed for the health of our planet. As IoT manufacturing scales up, we must match that growth by improving and scale up recycling methods according to researchers at the University of Birmingham. Batteries alone contain important metals like lithium, manganese, copper, and cobalt, all of which must be repurposed at scale, lest we run out at best, or they find their way into our oceans at worst.

Privacy and Security

In 2015, the Chinese Ministry of Public Security announced a goal that shocked the world: build a database of China’s 1.3 billion citizens with the intent to track their movement and actions anywhere in the country within three seconds, leveraging AI powered by a network of nationwide IoT cameras. By 2019, that system became fully functional at scale, and while growing in speed and sophistication. Before other countries point fingers, the USA’s PRISM program and UK’s Tempora system are clear examples of western snooping. But while technologies like Big Data and AI open the door to global digital surveillance, the last mile of data collection lies in IoT. Yes, the NSA could read your emails, but China needed IoT to take mass surveillance into the real world.

Nation state actors are not our only source of privacy and security concerns. Target’s database of 40 million credit and debit card accounts was famously stolen in late 2013 through hacking their HVAC’s IoT system. An Internet-connected fish tank was used to launch an attack a nearby casino, stealing 10 GB of data. Parent’s everywhere were horrified to learn their WiFi enabled baby monitors were vulnerable to hacks, acting as remote spy cams for would-be thieves.

Security and privacy attacks are varied, weird, and increasing every year. The IoT community is starting to take security seriously. The Internet of Things Security Foundation (IoTSF ) and the Trusted IoT Alliance are some of the emerging groups dedicated to promoting tighter collaboration between device makers, users, and security experts. There is also a burgeoning field of IoT network security services, many leveraging AI to detect and track suspicious IoT network traffic, like Senr.io. Expertise in IoT security is going to be a busy field in this decade.

Beyond being open to vulnerabilities, IoT networks can be weaponized, too. Political scientists call this phenomena “dual-use technology,” similar to how nuclear reactions can be used for both power generation and building bombs. Vast collections of IoT devices can compromised, and used to take down systems in something called a botnet distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. Think of this like how a single bee sting might hurt, but a swarm can be deadly. IoT devices can be compromised over several years as a botnet, and in one instant coordinate attacks in the hands of a single person, or even a government. In mid 2019, hackers released Russian Intelligence Service FSB documents describing IoT botnets under the country’s control. IoT is yet another front in the endless fight for security.

Competing standards and protocols

Google Nest, Apple HomeKit, Amazon Alexa. ZigBee, Z-Wave, Thread. Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC), OneM2M, Object Management Group. These are a small taste of the myriad competing standards in the IoT space. Too many standards? There’s a standard for that. Several, in fact, be it Open Interconnect Consortium (OIC) backed by Intel, or AllSeen Alliance born from Qualcomm.

What’s interesting in the IoT space is not a lack of strong partnerships or consortiums, but an overabundance of them. This balkanization of IoT platform standards should be little cause for concern however. First, because most consumer home devices support multiple standards, a pattern that is increasingly followed by industrial IoT. My August Smart Lock supports Apple HomeKit, Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and more. The obvious second reason is that there’s good precedent for the market demanding a common interoperable standard that allows consumers to use competitors on the same network. Movies Anywhere is a great example of this, where Amazon, Apple, Google, and Vudu all agreed that movie purchases on one network could be streamed through any of the others. This consortium cemented consumer belief that they actually own the purchased movie. The 2019 announcement by Apple, Google, and Amazon to align their platforms into a more seamless experience is both good news for users of those services, but bad news for anyone wishing to break into the oligopoly.

All of these open problems aside, the good news is that none of them are inherently unsolvable. Each of these problems is also an opportunity make things better, not only for the industries already engaged in IoT, but leaving lots of space open for those who want to solve real problems in the burgeoning IoT industry. With 75 devices per person by 2030, there are plenty of users to serve.

IoT Peak-End

“I for one welcome our new robot overlords.” — Ken Jennings, Jeopardy Champion

The Internet of Things will be a complete and forever shift in how humans interact with the world. Once we all get used to smart of things, we’ll be loathe to accept dumb ones, once price ceases to be an issue. Smart will become the new normal, and basic refrigerators will go the way of hand-crank car windows and TV knobs. Through wearables, smart homes and offices, much of our world will be understandable, controllable, and automatable at ever deeper levels.

Anything prefixed with “Smart” is likely IoT, but things can get even smarter. IoT will in many ways also be many people’s first direct experience with artificial intelligence. While AI algorithms have been predicting weather and curating personalized media for years, it’s this vague thing in the background, considerably less direct than chatting with Alexa on an Amazon Echo IoT speaker. And with a wide collection of IoT devices interacting with aspects of an environment, it will become the front line technology of what Microsoft’s Satya Nadella calls the “intelligent edge”. It’s one thing to have IoT smart fabrics, it’s another thing to have it intelligently reconfigure a garment based on expected rain.

“The Internet will disappear. There will be so many IP addresses, so many devices, sensors, things that you are wearing, things that you are interacting with, that you won’t even sense it. It will be part of your presence all the time. Imagine you walk into a room, and the room is dynamic… you are interacting with the things going on in the room.” — Eric Schmidt, Google chairman, on a panel at the World Economic Forum. Mass adoption of IoT is one big step toward the AI of things, and eventually, the full ubiquitous computing described by Schmidt.

Finally, we’re growing used to a world where weather predictions are always available at our literal finger tips through smart phones. But now we crave more. More accuracy, more granularity, more precision. A global net of worldwide IoT sensors is a necessary step in such desires. With grander visions still, we want to save endangered species, reduce rainforest destruction, and keep pollution from our water supplies. Pure donut economics. IoT can play a major part in living more harmoniously with our world by ensuring it stays within acceptable boundaries.

References

• “IoT Inc: How Your Company Can Use the Internet of Things to Win in the Outcome Economy.” Bruce Sinclair
• “The Internet of Things.” Samuel Greengard
• “The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future.” Kevin Kelly
• “The Technical Foundations of IoT.” Boris Adryan, Dominik Obermaier, Paul Fremantle
• “The Third Wave: An Entrepreneur’s Vision of the Future.” Steve Case
• “Calm Technology: Principles and Patterns for Non-Intrusive Design.” Amber Case
• “The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies.” Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee
• “Building Wireless Sensor Networks: With ZigBee, XBee, Arduino, and Processing.” Robert Faludi
• The little-known story of the first IoT device