The role of the Internet of Things development platform and the functions that need to be improved (with the popular Internet of Things development platform)
As the important market in the future, the Internet of Things, whether it is PC processor overlord Intel or mobile processor leader Qualcomm, is actively deploying the Internet of Things. Among them, the Internet of Things development platform is an important part of the Internet of Things. Do you understand the concept of the Internet of Things platform and its role? This article is for you to explain.
IntroductionSince the first time Kevin Ashton proposed this concept in 1999, the Internet of Things has undergone a rapid transformation. With the exponential growth in the number and variety of devices connected to the Internet of Things in recent years, the Internet of Things has become a mainstream technology with great potential to promote the lifestyle of today's society.
In the technology and engineering of the Internet of Things, there are still clear boundaries between hardware and software platforms, and most of them focus on hardware. Only a handful of vendors offer IoT software services: For example, only 13 of the top 100 IoT startups ranked by Mattermark based on total investment are offering IoT software services.
This article provides a comprehensive survey of the existing IoT software platform based on our detailed analysis of IoT vendors. The IoT vendors selected at the end of this article are based entirely on the criteria of whether these vendors provide software solutions to process information obtained from IoT devices/sensors. Note: Although we want to be as comprehensive as possible, there are still some recent improvements to these platforms that may be missed in this article.
Based on recent surveys, we selected the most critical functions of the IoT software platform: device management, integration, security, data collection protocols, analysis types, and support visualization to compare sample functionality. These features are briefly described in the second half of this article.
Device management and support integration
Device management is one of the important functions required for the IoT software platform. The IoT platform should maintain a bunch of connected devices and track the operational status of those devices; it should also be able to handle configuration, firmware (or other software) update issues, and provide device-level error reporting and processing scenarios. Device users should be able to obtain statistics at the personal device level before the end of each day.
Support integration is another important feature required by the IoT software platform. Important operations and data that need to be published from the IoT platform should be accessible through the API, which is often used for this purpose.
information security
The information security required to operate the IoT software platform is higher than that required for common software applications and services. Millions of devices are connected to the IoT platform, representing the proportion of vulnerabilities we need to deal with. In general, in order to avoid eavesdropping, the network connection between the IoT device and the IoT software platform needs to be secured by a strong encryption mechanism.
However, on modern IoT software platforms, most low-cost, low-power devices cannot support such advanced access control measures. Therefore, the IoT software platform itself needs to take alternative measures to solve such device-level problems. For example, the IoT traffic is divided into private networks, relying on the strong security of the cloud application level, requiring regular updates of passwords and supporting verification of firmware updates, as well as signatures to update software, etc., which can enhance the security of the Internet of Things software platform. level.
Data collection protocol
Another important aspect to note is the type of protocol used for data communication between the various components of the IoT software platform. IoT platforms may need to scale to millions or even billions of devices (nodes). Lightweight communication protocols should be used to achieve low power consumption and low bandwidth functionality.
Note: Although we use the protocol as an overview term in this article, the protocols used to collect data can be divided into the following categories: applications, load containers, messaging, and legacy protocols.
data analysis
Data collected from sensors connected to the IoT platform needs to be analyzed intelligently to obtain meaningful insights.
There are four main types of IoT data analysis: real-time analysis, batch analysis, predictive analysis, and interactive analysis. Real-time analysis: Perform an online (dynamic) analysis of the data stream. Sample operations include window-based integration, filtering, transformation, and more.
Batch Analysis: Operates on the accumulated data set. In this way, the batch operation will run for a predetermined period of time, perhaps for hours or days. Predictive analysis: Focus on forecasting based on various statistical and machine learning techniques. Interactive analysis: Perform multiple exploratory analyses on data streams and batch data. The last one is real-time analysis, which takes up a heavier weight on any software platform.
Current IoT software platformAfter a careful investigation of the current IoT software platform, we found that each of the features mentioned above has been implemented, but to a different extent. We have listed the relevant platforms below and have a summary of the features:
Table 1 Summary of related platform functions (the column labeled "Unknown" means that the relevant information cannot be found in the available files)
Obviously, many of the Internet of Things startups listed above, many of which may not yet have device management capabilities. In this regard, IoT software platform vendors are also required to provide solutions.
In addition, when analyzing the generated IoT data, there is relatively little support in terms of calculation and visualization. Most of them support real-time analytics - this is a must-have feature of any IoT framework. However, only a handful of IoT software platforms support three other types of analysis. The visual interface mostly appears as a simple model such as a portal, allowing the management of the Internet of Things ecosystem, but rarely provides visual data analysis.
There are several common features in different IoT software platforms, including an integrated REST API, support for collecting data using the MQTT protocol, and link encryption using SSL. Although not mentioned in Table 1, a single ParStream company can achieve a throughput of 3 million to 4 million lines per second.
This shows that most IoT software platforms are designed without much consideration for the system performance of the IoT deployment, which is critical in real situations.
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