The Internet of Things: Key Applications and Protocols

Introduction

Innovation rarely comes where it is expected. Many governments have been spending billions to increase the Internet bandwidth available to end users … only to discover that there are only a limited number of HD movies one can watch at a given time. In fact, there are also a limited number of human beings on Earth.

The Internet is about to bring us another ten years of surprises, as it morphs into the “Internet of Things” (IoT). Your mobile phone and your PC are already connected to the Internet, maybe even your car GPS too. In the coming years your car, office, house and all the appliances it contains, including your electricity, gas and water meters, street lights, sprinklers, bathroom scales, tensiometers and even walls1 will be connected to the IoT. Tomorrow, several improvements will be made to these appliances such as not heating your house if hot weather is forecast, watering your garden automatically only if it doesn't rain, getting assistance immediately on the road, and so on. These improvements will facilitate our lives and utilize natural resources more efficiently.

Why is this happening now? As always, there is a combination of small innovations that, together, have reached a critical mass:

• Fieldbus technologies, using proprietary protocols and standards (LON, KNX, DALI, CAN, ModBus, M-Bus, ZigBee, Zwave …), have explored many vertical domains. Gradually, these domains have started to overlap as use cases expanded to more complex situations, and protocols ...