What Is A Smart City?

What Is The Internet Of Things, Or Iot? A Simple Explanation

The transmission media used to link devices to form a computer network include electrical cable, optical fiber, and free space. In the OSI model, the software to handle the media is defined at layers 1 and 2 — the physical layer and the data link layer. Overlay networks have also been proposed as a way to improve Internet routing, such as through quality of service guarantees achieve higher-quality streaming media.

In the average automobile alone, there are dozens of different types of sensors. Tire pressure sensors indicate whether a tire is flat or in need of more air. Self-driving cars such as the Tesla are equipped with ultrasonic sensors that measure the distance between the vehicle and other objects in its environment using sound waves. Home security systems usemotion sensors, which detect the movement of primarily larger objects. The most commonly used motion sensor for home surveillance is called a Passive Infared system, which detects infrared radiation in the sensor’s environment.

More information about flow sensors may be found in our related guide All About Flow Sensors. Level Sensors/Detectors are electronic or electro-mechanical devices used for determining the height of gases, liquids, or solids in tanks or bins and providing signals to the inputs of control or display devices. Typical level sensors use ultrasonic, capacitance, vibratory, or mechanical means to determine product height.

This will require new technology – like tamper-proof edge servers that can collect and analyse data far from the cloud or corporate data center. Tech analyst IDC calculates that within five years IoT gadgets will be creating 79.4 zettabytes of data. Some of this IoT data will be "small and bursty" says IDC – a quick update like a temperature reading from a sensor or a reading from a smart meter. Other devices might create huge amounts of data traffic, like a video surveillance camera using computer vision. Badly installed IoT products could easily open up corporate networks to attack by hackers, or simply leak data. It might seem like a trivial threat but imagine if the smart locks at your office refused to open one morning or the smart weather station in the CEO's office was used by hackers to create a backdoor into your network.

Communication Protocols

Even larger objects such as self-driving cars or planes are becoming IoTs, or are at least enhanced by critical IoT components, such as the sensors and actuators mounted on larger ship or jet engines to ensure they are operating efficiently. Processing the data can take place in data centers or cloud, but sometimes that’s not an option. In the case of critical devices such as shutoffs in industrial settings, the delay of sending data from the device to a remote data center is too great.