“Internet of things” (IoT) has grown exponentially over the past few years. It has become a buzzing keyword on the Internet and a common topic of conversation everywhere around the globe. Smart locks, smart cars, smart air-conditioners … yeah they all come under the “Internet of things” concept.
This concept has a huge upside potential to impact our lives and make everything around us far more easily accessible than ever. So, let’s get started, here in this article we will briefly explain you everything you need to know about in the most simplest of words and here we go.
So, Here’s What Internet of things Means…
Simply put, the concept of connecting any device to the Internet is the Internet of things or rightly called “Internet of Everything”. This means any device including cell phones, washing machines, lamps, wearable devices and any other electronic gadget in your house could be connected directly to the Internet. To enable such connectivity, devices are getting smarter and are pre-built with circuits to enable Internet connectivity. Well the other major problem that used to be around the corner was the IP Addressing issue which is long solved now with the release of the IPv6 back in 2012.
To put this entire concept more clearly, consider an example. Let’s say you will be home in half an hour and using your Android app, you turn on the air conditioner back home so that it keeps your house nice and cool by the time you reach home. This is just a small example of how easily you can manage every electronic device in your house or office with just the touch of few buttons.
How Does Internet Of Things work?
So we are here. This is the part where we can get as technical as possible and sit for days and talk about how several existing technologies and a few newer ones work together in implementing the IoT concept. But like we promised we’ll try and stay as simple as possible with our context, and if there’s anything you need to understand better or confused about do write back to us about it.
Okay, so all these smart devices use standards like the Wi-Fi, RFID, NFC, ZigBee, Z-Wave, Dash7, 6LoWPAN, the low energy bluetooth etc. which are all strong technical standards which can connect any device to the Internet. These act alongside a set of sensors onboard. They may be motion sensors, temperature sensors, light sensors or basically of any kind. Generally in a home automation system there also is a central hub that connects all these machines together and hence IoT also supports machine to machine communications.
Finally, there’s this cloud that manages all this sensory data and transfer them to your smartphones. So basically its a network of sensors attached to various electronic devices and centrally connected to the cloud. That’s how the Internet of Things concept works.
The wide range availability of broadband Internet, low cost sensors and simplified technology is helping more devices to get connected via wifi and share useful amount of data. These including several other factors has created perfect ground for the growth of IoT.