What is IoT ?

The Internet of things (IoT) is the arrangement of physical devices embedded with electronics, software, sensors, actuators, and network connectivity which enable these objects to collect and exchange data necessarily over the existing internet infrastructure.

The ‘thing’ in IoT could be a person with a fitness monitoring device or an automobile, a house, an office, a building, absolutely anything with sensing capabilities. In a simplistic way: objects that have been assigned an IP address ( Local of Global – for techies only 😛 ) and have the ability to collect and transfer data over a network without manual assistance or intrusion.

The concept of things with electronics connected to a network has been in existence for considerably a long period now. At a shallow glance, IoT does not look like a new concept. There are nevertheless complex disagreements between IoT and established M2M. IoT endeavours to connect every device (things) that we interact with including those which are commonly not connected to the network. One more anomaly is that it intends to leverage existing IP based networks instead of creating dedicated network infrastructure as is the practice in the current generation of M2M, thus creating a global network of things. While the premise of connection to the Internet increases the reach of IoT, it also poses unique challenges. One such challenge is that many IoT nodes have limited memory, storage and computation capabilities and are not able to connect to the IP based networks directly. An IoT Gateway fills in this gap by acting as a bridge between IP based public network and local networks designed with specific needs of the IoT nodes in mind.