INTRODUCTION TO IOT- PART-II

Summary

This lecture discusses the basics of the Internet of Things (IoT), highlighting the explosive growth of connected devices projected to reach 20-50 billion by 2018. It covers key challenges such as address shortages and connectivity issues across different standards. The lecture also explores concepts like IoT LAN, WAN, nodes, gateways, proxies, and address management, emphasizing the importance of efficient network structure and mobility addressing. Solutions like IPv6, tunneling, and multi-homing are introduced to handle these challenges, with a call for new addressing schemes for IoT beyond IPv4 and IPv6.

Takeaways

• 😀 The Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to involve billions of connected devices by 2018, with estimates ranging from 20 to 50 billion.
• 🌐 The primary challenge of IoT networks is the looming address crunch, as IPv4 cannot provide enough unique addresses for all devices.
• 📶 A diverse range of connectivity standards exists for IoT, including cellular, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and many others, each requiring handshaking mechanisms to work together.
• 💡 IoT networks consist of key components such as LAN, WAN, nodes, gateways, and proxies, much like the traditional Internet infrastructure.
• 🔑 Within an IoT LAN, devices have unique local addresses, but these can be reused in other LANs, which helps address address limitations.
• 🌍 Gateways serve as crucial intermediaries between IoT LANs and the broader internet, and proxies are used to connect IoT networks to the internet securely.
• 🔄 To address mobility, IoT networks assign unique prefixes to gateways, allowing nodes to maintain the same local addresses even when moving across networks.
• 🛠️ Tunneling protocols like IKEv2 allow IoT nodes to communicate with remote anchor points, ensuring that address changes due to mobility do not affect communication.
• 🔄 Address translation between IPv4 and IPv6 or tunneling IPv6 over IPv4 are vital to support IoT networks using both addressing schemes.
• 🔒 Multi-homing techniques are employed in IoT to improve network reliability, ensuring that if one network fails, another can take over and maintain connectivity.

Q & A

What is the estimated number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices expected to be connected by 2018?

By 2018, it is estimated that between 20 to 50 billion IoT devices will be connected, based on various studies.

What fundamental problem arises with the rapid growth of IoT devices?

The fundamental problem is the potential address crunch, where there might not be enough unique addresses, such as IP addresses, to assign to the large number of IoT devices.

Why is IPv4 not sufficient for the growing number of IoT devices?

IPv4 addresses are limited to 32 bits, providing only about 4 billion unique addresses, which is not enough to handle the vast number of IoT devices that are expected to be connected.

What is the role of IPv6 in addressing the address crunch in IoT?

IPv6, with a 128-bit address space, provides a much larger pool of addresses, helping to resolve the address shortage that IPv4 cannot accommodate.

What are some of the connectivity mechanisms available for IoT?

Some of the connectivity mechanisms include cellular networks, Wi-Fi, Ethernet, Bluetooth Low Energy, Zigbee, and various other standards like IEEE 802.15.4.

What are the key components of an IoT network, and how are they similar to the traditional internet?

The key components of an IoT network include IoT LAN, IoT WAN, IoT nodes, gateways, and proxies. These are analogous to the components of the traditional internet, such as local area networks (LANs), wide area networks (WANs), and routers.

How do IoT LANs handle unique addresses for devices?

In IoT LANs, each device has a locally unique address, which is unique within that particular LAN. However, the same address could be reused in another IoT LAN.

What is the role of IoT gateways and proxies in an IoT network?

IoT gateways connect different IoT LANs to a broader IoT WAN, while proxies help provide connectivity to external networks, like the internet, by connecting beyond the gateway.

How does mobility affect the addressing scheme in IoT, and how is it handled?

When an IoT device moves between networks, the network prefix may change, but the local LAN address of the device remains the same. This is managed by assigning unique network prefixes through gateways, which ensures address stability despite mobility.

What is the concept of multi-homing in IoT, and why is it important?

Multi-homing involves connecting an IoT device or subnet to multiple networks to improve reliability. If one network fails, another can take over, ensuring continuous connectivity.