The Internet did change the world drastically.
The Internet of things was supposed to change the world much more drastically
than what the Internet did. So what
exactly does internet of things refers to? Internet of things refers to
uniquely identifiable objects (things) and their virtual representations in an
Internet-like structure.
As Ashton who coined the phrase “Internet of
things” remarked “If we had computers that knew everything there was to know
about things—using data they gathered without any help from us—we would be able
to track and count everything, and greatly reduce waste, loss and cost. We
would know when things needed replacing, repairing or recalling, and whether
they were fresh or past their best. The Internet of Things has the potential to
change the world, just as the Internet did. Maybe even more so. ” What happened
to this potential of changing the world?
I believe that communications is the missing
piece of the puzzle. These uniquely identifiable objects will be much more
useful if they are able to communicate. Being able to receive and send data to
the gazillions of devices in an efficient fashion will make possible several
services that will improve quality of human life and address economic
inefficiencies. This will also result in
less wasteful usage of resources.
Examples of some such services include
efficient usage of resources that make up the smart grid by measuring and
communicating various quantities such as temperature, current, voltage to the
right places (utility offices), making human life better by measuring and
communicating various quantities such as blood pressure, sugar levels, heart
beat etc to the right places (physician’s offices), condition based maintenance
of various machines like current transformers, capacitor bank controllers, etc etc. The resulting operational efficiencies can
result in tremendous savings for various organizations in many different
sectors of human life. In fact many more
services than what we can imagine now will be made possible.
One might question as to why do we claim that
communications is the missing piece of the puzzle here. To answer this,
consider cellular communications. All humans were “uniquely” identifiable but
then the spread of wireless communication made possible services that changed
the quality of human life. Various services such as commerce, gps based
directions, application stores (Appstore), micro-lending, planning for crop
planting etc have become possible due to the rapid expansion of wireless
communication. Services that were not
thought of before the wireless communication revolution are now commonplace.
Note that internet by itself did not make this
possible since Internet did not have the aspect of personalized communication
possible with cellular networks. Cell
phones are always on and are permanently carried by humans and they are
personalized in the sense that typically there is a single human owner for each
cell phone. Thus the cell phone seems to have provided the wireless communication link for the human carrying the cell phone. These are the aspects of cell phones that revolutionized human
life. And I believe
that providing a communication link to such devices will help realize the
potential associated with ‘Internet of things’.
Of course providing the communication link to the
gazillions of devices seems like an easy problem to solve. All that we need to
do is to enable these gazillions of devices to use the cell phone networks and
we have made communication possible. Surely this should lead to the services I was referring to earlier. So then, why have we not seen this?
The solution is not as
simple. There are several challenges all stemming from the fact that human communication is very different from device communication. We will get into details of several of these challenges in future articles.
