Internet of Things IOT
Thanks to the unrelenting progress of the semiconductor industry, all the
digital parts of a computer can be put onto a single chip, called a microcontroller.
A 32-bit microcontroller chip costing less than $10 may have
more than twice as much memory as the original 8-bit Apple II computer
with its 48 KB of RAM, and may run 100 times faster. A hobbyist board
that incorporates such a chip, along with Ethernet and a Micro SD card
slot, can be purchased for about $60.
A brief history of the IoT :
The concept of adding sensors and intelligence to physical objects was first mooted in the 1980s, when university students decided to modify a Coca-Cola vending machine to track its contents remotely. But the technology was cumbersome and progress was limited.
In 1999, the term “Internet of Things” was coined by computer scientist Kevin Ashton. While working at Procter & Gamble, Ashton suggested placing radio frequency identification (RFID) chips on products to track them throughout the supply chain.
To get executives’ attention, he reportedly included the then-trendy word “internet” in his proposal. And the phrase stuck.
Over the following decade, public interest in IoT technology started to take off, as more and more connected devices came to market.
In the year 2000, LG announced the first smart refrigerator, in 2007 the first iPhone was launched, and by 2008, the number of connected appliances exceeded the number of people on the planet.
In the year 2009, Google started testing driverless cars and in 2011, Google’s Nest smart thermostat arrived on the market, allowing remote control of central heating.
Everyday uses :
Connected devices fall into three domains: consumer IoT, such as wearables, enterprise IoT, which includes smart factories and precision agriculture, and public spaces IoT, such as waste management.
Businesses use IoT to optimize their supply chains, manage inventory and improve customer experience, while smart consumer devices such as the Amazon Echo speaker, are now ubiquitous in homes due to the prevalence of low-cost and low-power sensors.
Cities have been deploying IoT technology for more than a decade — to streamline everything from water meter readings to traffic flow.
“In New York City, for example, every single building (so more than 817,000) was retrofitted with a wireless water meter, starting back in 2008, which replaced the manual system where you had to walk up to a meter read the numbers and generate bills that way,” says Jeff Merritt, the World Economic Forum’s head of IoT and Urban Transformation.
“Many cities now leverage license plate readers, traffic counters, red light cameras, radiation sensors and surveillance cameras to manage day-to-day operations.”
The future of IoT :
The spectrum of potential IoT applications is “limited only by the Human imagination” — and many of those potential applications can benefit the planet, as well as its people.
A review in 2018 of more than 640 IoT implementations, conducted by the World Economic Forum in partnership with research firm IoT Analytics, found that 84 percent of existing IoT implementations meet, or have the power to advance, the U.N.’s sustainability objectives.
This includes promoting more efficient use of natural resources, constructing better and more equitable “smart cities,” and the development of clean and affordable energy alternatives.
IoT smart roads connected to self-driving cars could improve driver safety and improve traffic flow, which could reduce the average commute time by 30 minutes. Response time to emergencies could also be reduced significantly.
Real-time mapping of crime and tools for predicting police could also help prevent crime. McKinsey estimates that using the data to more effectively deploy scarce resources could save 300 lives a year in a city with the population and profile of Rio de Janeiro.
Security and privacy :
But even with all the advantages, IoT technologies can also be abused, and risks include security and privacy risks, cybercrime, surveillance in the workplace, home or public spaces, and control over mobility and expression.
Despite some sort of security provided by IoT enabling technologies (e.g., communication protocols), or by intrusion prevention systems (e.g., network firewalls), attackers still find ways to compromise devices, or to eavesdrop the communication between them. Unlike laptop and desktop computers (which have frequent on-off cycles), many IoT devices such as webcams and wireless routers operate 24/7 unattended. This makes IoT devices particularly prone to various attacks, such as attacks aiming at recruiting devices for botnets, which makes IoT networks dangerous not only for themselves but also for remote systems that are victims of attacks launched by infected IoT devices. Moreover, IoT-based systems that handle sensitive data (e.g., healthcare IS) need to promptly react to malicious activities in order to prevent private data from leaving the network. IoT networks, thus, must be equipped with some sort of security and privacy-preserving mechanism, such as intrusion detection systems, intrusion prevention systems, attack reaction systems, proactive defense mechanisms, privacy-preserving protocols, etc.
Sources :
