Internet of Things is a network with connected devices having unique identification number talking with each other and taking appropriate actions without human intervention. It is also known as Machine to Machine communication. The devices can range from sensors to actuators make the job easy for the end users. Internet of things (IoT) is a new term but it is the latest revolution in the technology market and creating a plethora of business opportunities which includes well established companies to new startups. There are multiple reasons why IoT is emerging as one of the promising areas for doing business. We have 3G, 4G network which allow data transferfaster than that in earlier years. At the same time, the costs of components used for IoT such asultra-low power microcontroller, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth Low Energy devices, Cloud Services and other technology have fallen significantly and are within the reach of a larger consumer base. With the roll out of IPv6 technologies number of IP address has increased from roughly 4 billion to 340 trillion. Today everyone is using internet which is fast and control a variety of devices through internet. More consumers are realizing that there is a need of machine to machine communication (M2M) which can add value to your business as well as your home.
When most of the semiconductor companies are competing in the market for providing business solutions based on IoT, STMicroelectronics is also a leading player for providing IoT based solutions in the market of home automation, healthcare and industrial segment.
IoT System:
Internet of Thing system solution will mainly comprises of a Gateway board which controls the complete system and couple of sensor nodes having different sensors like temperature, humidity, and light and motion sensor. The information from the different sensor nodes can be viewed on the web application over cloud which can be seen by the user with help of smartphone anywhere at any time. Figure 1 shows the block diagram of the IoT system developed by STMicroelectronics. It shows the IoT scenario with respect to the some of the available technologies.
Wireless Technologies: used in the IoT System are:
Sub-GHz communication: It is short range wireless technology which operates at frequency less that 1 GHz, MHz band which is generally used in smart metering and home building automation applications.
Wi-Fi:isa local area wireless technology that allows an electronic device to exchange data or connect to the internet using 2.4 GHz UHF(Ultra High Frequency) and 5 GHz SHF(Super High Frequency) radio waves.
Bluetooth Low Energy:is wireless personal area network technology designed for applications in healthcare, fitness, security. It operates at the frequency of 2.4GHz. The range of communication is approximately 100 meter.
NFC:stands for Near Field Communication which operates at a frequency of 13.56MHz. The range of communication is 5-10 cm.
IoT Applications:
IoT has use-case in all the M2M communications. Some important segment can be classified as:
- Home automation
- Healthcare
- Industrial
Home Automation: IoT makes it possible to realize the possibility of Smart Home concept. Consumer can monitor their home 24×7 from their Smartphones or can give commands to the electronic gadgets connected to the Gateway to wake-up from sleep state. Single application can be used for all the connected gadgets which make the consumer life comfortable. The electronic gadgets can be air – conditioner etc. With the coming of BTLE, the sensor nodes should consume very low power, hence increased battery life.
Security can be one of the major concerns while providing the above features to consumer. The system should implement security features in the system which makes sure that no intruders can take control of the home automation system.
Healthcare:is an upcoming segment where IoT can bring revolutionary change for the end user. The patient can be connected to the doctor, hospital or insurance companies. Take a use-case where the end user measures the temperature and blood pressure of the body and it is transmitted to the user profile. The healthcare instrument may have BTLE or NFC which transmits data to the Gateway and the Gateway further uploads data on the personal profile of the patients which can be monitored by the hospital or doctor. The reading can be analyzed and incase if there is any emergency, swift action can be taken to provide immediate care to the patient.Figure 3 talks about the use case of Remote Healthcare system based on IoT.
IoT can help us to effectively carry our business in healthcare segment with centralized system of patient monitoring by adhering to compliance rules laid down by the government. This would improve team collaboration and reduce the work load of the care providers
The challenges in the healthcare could be Data Integrity, Need to comply with local government regulation and we need to be cost competitive to provide a solution which can be easily adopted by our customer
Industrial: applications are ever green applications which get upgraded with the advent of new technology. IoT can play an important role to monitor the industrial application.It can be monitoring of the industrial office area, commercial perishable application. There are places in the industrial segment where human intervention is next to impossible and the sensors with connectivity play an important role for the maintenance of the establishment. Figure 4 talks about the Industrial automation based on IoT.
System Solution from STMicroelectronics
ST has developed IoT based system solution which has a main Wireless Bridge platform which has all the wireless technologies (Wi-Fi, BT, Sub-GHz and NFC) and Sensor board which comprises of different environmental sensor. The communication between the Wireless Bridge platform and Sensor node is through 6LoWPAN.6LoWPAN is an acronym of IPv6 Low power Wireless Personal Area Networks. The 6LoWPAN concept originated from the idea that “the Internet Protocol could and should be applied even to the smallest devices, and that low-power devices with limited processing capabilities should be able to participate in the Internet of Things.The sensor data can be sent to the web application and can also be viewed on Smartphone. The complete system fits in to the category of M2M where no human intervention is required once the system is installed.
Hardware:The Wireless Bridge platform consist of Gateway board and Sensor boards. The Gateway board comprises of Wi-Fi (SPWF), BT (SPBT), Sub-GHz (SP1ML, SPSGRF) and NFC(CR95HF) wireless communication which are controlled by STM32 micro-controller. The sensor board consists of sensor (Temperature, Humidity, Pressure, Motion MEMS, and Humidity). The communication between the Gateway board and Sensor boards is based on 6LoWPAN communication (IPv6). The Gateway board reads data from the Sensor boards and uploads it on the Web Application. Figure 6 is the Gateway board with the major wireless Technologies and Figure 7 is the sensor nodes with different environmental sensors on board communicating with the Gateway board on 6LoWPAN.
The data on any device based on Sensor Nodes can be made available on a web application. The user can login using his credentials on the webserver and check the current state of the device (on/off). For e.g. a user can login using his mobile/computer on the web server and check the current temperature at his home remotely. He can control/set the temperature of home equipment remotely.
In absence of Wi-Fi connection, Bluetooth communication can be used to exchange data. A Bluetooth enabled Smartphone can be paired with Wireless Gateway systemon SPP profile mode and can be used to exchange data from phone to sensors node with an Android Application. The snapshot of the Android App is shown in Figure 8.
Software Support:
An IoT device by definition is connected to the internet. We need following categories of operations to use an IoT device
- Remote administration of the device
- Configuration of the device
- Reading data from the device
- Sending control commands to the device.
An IoT device is a lower power device with limited storage capacity, so it needs a server to uploaded data to and to facilitate control operations. The server should always be available, since the device may send a data update request at any time. Due to the unpredictable nature of the traffic generated by IoT devices, a cloud based solution is best suited for the implementing such a server platform. While implementing a large IoT network, correct planning of the platform server becomes important. Following features should be taken into account
- How the IoT device identifies itself
- Ease of registration and provisioning of devices
- Device data and registration information security
- Mechanism of data update.
- Performance
- Reporting to user.
- Triggers / actions to be taken if the data exceeds some predefined ranges
- Handling authentication and data sharing among users
- Responding to data queries in visual and machine readable form.
- Easy scaling as more IoT nodes are added to the system.
Implementation of an IoT platform is a complex job as many Web Technologies work together to make the complete platform operational. Many commercial and open source solutions are available to solve the above mentioned problems. Even bigwigs like IBM, Oracle and Microsoft are entering the arena. Some of these may even be customized to suite specific project needs.
Some of the IoT cloud providers are Xively, Ses.Se,ThingSpeak ,IOBridge ,ThingWorx, Azure ISS , Axeda, Sensinode.
STMicroelectronics has developed Windows Azure based Cloud application. The user can create his/her account by visiting http://cloudbridge.azurewebsites.net/and start working with the sensor nodes. Figure 9 shows the snapshot of the login page of Cloud Application.
Key Features of Cloud application are:
- Platform uses HTTP REST as primary communication API
- Data can be returned to the clients in XML/JSON formats
- Web, Android, iOS based clients supported
- Web sockets for real-time data communication
- The current solution is hosted on Azure Cloud
When creating an IoT solution it’s important to know requirement from the hardware and the firmware perspective to communicate with the Cloud Application. An IoT device or node may communicate with the IoT platform server directly or through a gateway. When contacting directly it should have the full TCP/IP stack and Wi-Fi/3G hardware. In home or industrial environments where we have many nodes, it’s more economical and power saving to have simpler nodes communicating with IoT gateway using short range wireless communication. The gateway in-turn communicates with the IoT platform server.
In the most simplistic implementations the devices can use plain HTTP request to post data to the server. The devices have to poll to get any command from the platform server.
The devices can also use protocols like web sockets or MQTT to establish persistent two way communication with the server. Such implementations have better performance and bandwidth utilization but also have higher power consumption.
Let’s take a quick look at some terms common to most of the commercially available IoT platforms
Channel:IoT platform serves multitudes of devices, so it needs to identify the device from which data is coming. Most of the implementations use restful APIs which include channel identifier in the request URL or sometime in the HTTP request header
Data Stream: Data stream is a set of related data points posted to a channel.
API Keys:Use of API Key constitutes a simple security enabler by requiring the nodes to send predefined keys with each request to the server. These keys enables sever to establish identity of the node and also allows to selectively revoking access if required.
With its cloud solution STMicroelectronics also provides a Windows based Software Utility known as “Wireless Bridge Configuration Utility” to configure the Sensors nodes and integrate them with Gateway System. The application also registers the nodes on the platform server. The application can also be used for debugging and firmware upgrade of Sensor nodeboard and Gateway System. The Wireless Bridge Configuration Utility simplifies the configuration Sensor Node and Wireless Bridge
Conclusion:
With more and more connected devices, IoT will finally converge to IoE(Internet of Everything). All the intelligent nodes will be directly connected to internet and be available to the user at any time. People will be more connected with technologies which will make the life more easy and comfortable.
Authors:
- Indar Prakash Singhal, Sr. Staff Engg, IPD System Lab and Technical Marketing, STMicroelectronics, India
- Raunaque Mujeeb Quaiser, Senior Manager, IPD System Lab and Technical Marketing, STMicroelectronics, India
- Prashant-mpa Pandey, Technical Leader, IPD System Lab and Technical Marketing, STMicroelectronics, India
- Filippo Colaianni, Technical Marketing Manager ENG, IPD System Lab and Technical Marketing, STMicroelectronics
