UNIT 6
Internet of Things Application Examples
Utilities were among the earliest Internet of Things (IoT) adopters, with smart metering at the forefront of that growth, helping utility providers optimize energy distribution and giving customers actionable insights to improve energy efficiency. According to a report by ABI Research, the installed base of smart meters in 2018 totaled 700 million. By 2023, this number is expected to nearly double to 1.34 billion smart meters.
While utility meters have existed for years, sensors are what make them "smart" meters, enabling better meter management and data capture, analysis and transmission to the Cloud. Prevalent use cases include:
- Automated metering
- Electricity metering
- Gas metering
- Tank level monitoring
- Transformer monitoring
- Utility metering, monitoring and management
- Water metering
- Water flow and leakage monitoring
Energy efficiency and better resource management are public goods we can all benefit from. Smart meters featuring LoRa help to drive these efficiencies for a more sustainable world.
Traditionally being a part of the electrical grid infrastructure, a smart meter is an electronic device that allows for remote monitoring and recording of energy consumption. However, in the age of IoT and IoT platforms, standalone smart meters give way to more advanced and multi-purpose smart metering solutions. These solutions offer a broader range of remote monitoring and alerting capabilities as well as provide powerful data analytics tools to help companies and individual users optimize their energy, water, gas, or fuel consumption.
A typical challenge for companies implementing smart meters is how to integrate them within their infrastructure and set up custom-tailored smart metering use cases. The best way to achieve these goals is by using an IoT platform that offers out-of-the-box solutions and templates for smart metering, such as ThingsBoard. One of the strongest advantages of an enterprise-grade IoT platform is its data processing capabilities. Not only will you be able to collect data from your diverse smart meters in a centralized way, but also set up custom visualization dashboards, configure user alerts and notifications, and feed the collected data into other applications or data stores.
Another critical advantage is the cost of smart metering implementation. Using an IoT platform allows you to have all the necessary functionality right away and focus on building particular smart metering use cases instead, saving time and avoiding the risks associated with in-house IoT development.
Building end-to-end smart metering solutions:
IoT platform provides out-of-the-box components and APIs to dramatically drive down effort required to create smart metering solutions, resulting in highly improved time to market, reliability, and competitiveness of your solutions. By our estimates, companies may save up to 90% of their product development time when utilizing the following features and benefits of ThingsBoard:
- Reliable and fault tolerant data collection for your smart water meters, energy monitors, smart energy meters, etc.;
- Advanced, customizable data visualization for real-time and historical smart metering monitoring;
- Alarm widgets to instantly notify users and / or operators about any critical events or unusual consumption levels;
- Device management to allow you organize your endpoints in groups by specific attributes, simplify navigation between different types of entities and endpoint groups, and enable more flexible data analysis based on your custom groups;
- Customizable end-user dashboards (featuring drill-down capabilities) to analyze and share the results of smart metering monitoring;
- Integration with third-party analytics frameworks and solutions for advanced processing of smart metering data and reporting;
- Smart metering management by utilizing ThingsBoard API to control and manage smart meters.
Role of IoT in Smart City:
There are several reasons for municipalities to move to the wireless communications methods offered by IoT technologies.
- Cost is a key driver in the decision to convert from wired solutions to wireless, as it is massively expensive to install and maintain landlines. Additionally, the costs of cellular data plans are dropping and the robustness and throughput of wireless communications are therefore enabling new use cases that would previously have been cost-prohibitive.
- Efficiency is another important impetus. In most wired solutions, service personnel must physically go to the installation site to audit and service the communications infrastructure. These "truck rolls" are expensive and inefficient, since they typically occur on a schedule whether or not a problem exists. By contrast, wireless communications enable remote monitoring and management of IoT deployments. This enables administrators to perform firmware updates and security patches across the entire deployment, and get automated notifications in the event of any issues.
- Resource reduction is often a driver as well, particularly in use cases such as smart street lighting and monitoring assets. These IoT applications make it possible to use sensors to gather data and wireless modules to control resource use, which can result in a dramatic reduction in energy use.
The solution incorporates the ruggedized Digi WR44R enterprise class router, which provides connectivity and data routing for multiple device nodes on the Smart Pole. The result is a comprehensive application supporting multiple uses:
- LED lighting controls
- Surveillance cameras
- Environmental sensors
- Electronic billboards
- Charging stations
- Wi-Fi coverage
The Core Role of IoT in Automotive Industry
IoT connectivity, smart sensors and gadgets, edge computing, mobile apps, and cloud services are going to revolutionize how you interact with and use your automobiles. Implementing the IoT applications in the automotive industry aids in the design results in performance increase, reduces cost, and enables quality control.
Industry 4.0 paving way with the IoT and Artificial Intelligence, the IoT applications in automotive is limitless.
Top Five Applications of IoT in Automobile Industry
With IoT technologies, the automotive industry is creating innovative and advanced solutions, including connected car solutions, Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems (ADAS), in-vehicle infotainment systems, navigation & telematics solutions, predictive maintenance solutions, Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) applications, Vehicle to Infrastructure (V2I) applications, and Vehicle to Everything (V2X) communication applications. Let us take a glance at the IoT automotive applications.
The fleet management solution is the latest IoT use case in the automotive industry that takes advantage of IoT and offers fleet operators a wide range of benefits over their lifetime. Starting with optimizing the maintenance and logistics to monitor driver performance, complying with environmental and safety regulations is the primary benefit of IoT applications in automotive. Additional to the Vehicle tracking, monitoring fuel utilization, shares stats about driver’s health and performance, sends idle alerts, preventive maintenance, and integrating a solution to service condition monitoring, is all extending applications of IoT in fleet management.
1) Real-Time Vehicle Telematics
Vehicle telematics allows the monitoring of location, movement, status, and behavior of a vehicle within a fleet. Connecting the telematics devices, the smart cloud-connected IoTboxes on vehicles provide real-time insights on vehicle state, driver health, and optimization of transportation is a significant rise of IoT in the automotive industry.
2) Cellular Vehicle to Everything (CV2X)
The real-time traffic flow information, mapping, infotainment, or remote access to emergency services, all these services require connectivity. In the IoT use case in automotive, a network that connects cars is a Cellular Vehicle to Everything (CV2X). There are two modes of operation with C-V2X: device-to-device and device-to-network.
Device-to-device enables communications like vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V), vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I), and vehicle-to-pedestrian (V2P). V2V, V2I, and V2P make connected roadways through innovations like collision avoidance, share data about speed, location and route via a single network and alert the driver about traffic signal priority/timing, and safety alerts to pedestrians and cyclists all possible.
3) IoT based Predictive maintenance
Combining big data, cloud computing, edge computing with sensors enable data collation, and analytics the Predictive technology based on IoT connectivity tools collects data on a vehicle’s part performance. It evaluates the risk of malfunction of the vehicle, and transmits the data over the cloud, and notifies the user by reducing breakdowns and enabling easy maintenance.
The main advantages of Automotive IoT solutions with predictive maintenance are as follows.
- Identify any parts failures before the occurrence
- Calculate remaining useful life/possible repairs up to a 75%
- Measures performance variables such as temperature, speed, electrical system, navigation route
- Lower costs of operations with an increase in safety
The IoT is expanding at a rapid rate and is expected to grow over the coming years at a pace which makes previous technology adoptions look insignificant. Predictions are that by 2020 there will be some +20 Billion connected devices worldwide. The IoT promises to connect everything from CCTV cameras, medical devices, smart home products to smart enabled vehicles and many more devices. Connecting these devices is promising to revolutionise our lives today by bringing greater efficiencies, improved customer service, more effective products and services in an abundance of markets and sectors.
With this growth comes many challenges, not least “how do we ensure these devices are secure?” Yet at the same time enabling these IoT devices to connect with services in a robust and automated way which doesn’t stifle or impact the growth of the market. Traditional PKI orientated architectures are too heavy weight and cumbersome for a lot of IoT type applications for today and future products. For IoT applications we need to have ways to secure products which meet the needs of each application in a way which suits the IoT markets.
A recently observed trend is that customers are starting to become aware that they need to take control of their own security posture, moving away from an approach which lets the manufacturer control it, to one which focusses on the customer’s device and platform requirements. Customers want to choose how the protect their businesses, IP and supply chain by creating their own individual security posture and avoiding using existing methods of using default passwords, which is not an acceptable or a secure option.
The most recent DDOS attacks use internet connected Cameras to form an army of zombie devices, these devices were then used to target specific services such as OVH. Over 145,000 devices were used in the OVH attack and generated up to 1.1 Tera Bits Per second of data traffic! Similar attacks were recently inflicted on Dyn DNS service, with a reported attack from 100,000 end devices that took out Twitter, Amazon and others for many users.
This DDOS attack along with several other recent attacks were started by attackers connecting to each Camera device (usually via SSH or a Telnet session) and then infecting them with a simple program that guessed at their factory-set passwords, often “admin” or “password.” Once infected, these devices were turned into an army of simple robots.
One way to make these DDOS type attacks harder is to ensure each device (in this case Cameras) uses a more robust username and password. If each device or a group of devices had different usernames and passwords, then gaining entry to vast swathe of devices would be more difficult.
The future: smart security surveillance
The times when video surveillance systems only deliver video that must be continuously observed by humans are over. Machines able to record and analyse video data in one go are already available, and they can provide security managers with deep insights instead of single pieces of information.
This will significantly improve security and security-related processes in many areas and industries by enabling faster and more insightful response to any sort of incidents. Future security surveillance essentially combines 3 technologies that will completely change the game: computer vision, automation andeep-learning, driven by powerful processors and apps on cameras in the IoT. Let's take a quick look at these technologies.
Computer vision is becoming smarter because of more sophisticated algorithms, faster devices, larger networks and access to a wider range of data sets through IoT. This allows machines to “see” and analyze in real time.
“Deep Learning and general AI techniques within computer vision, makes possible what would be impossible to do by the naked eye.”
Key Takeaways
- Deep Learning and general AI techniques within computer vision, makes possible what would be impossible to do by the naked eye.
- The times when video surveillance systems only deliver video that must be continuously observed by humans are over. Machines able to record and analyse video data in one go are already available, and they can provide security managers with deep insights instead of single pieces of information.
- The main advantages of Automotive IoT solutions with predictive maintenance are as follows.
- Identify any parts failures before the occurrence
- Calculate remaining useful life/possible repairs up to a 75%
- Measures performance variables such as temperature, speed, electrical system, navigation route
- Lower costs of operations with an increase in safety
References
- Bernd Scholz-Reiter, Florian Michahelles, “Architecting the Internet of Things”, ISBN 978- 3842-19156-5, Springer.
- Olivier Hersent, David Boswarthick, Omar Elloumi, “The Internet of Things” Key Applications and Protocols, ISBN 978-1-119-99435-0, Wiley Publications.
