How IOT (Internet-of-Things) Works?

How IOT (Internet-of-Things) Works?

The entire IOT process starts with the devices themselves like smartphones, smartwatches, electronic appliances like TV, Washing Machine which helps you to communicate with the IOT platform.

Here, are four fundamental components of an IoT system:

1) Sensors/Devices: Sensors or devices are a key component that helps you to collect live data from the surrounding environment. All this data may have various levels of complexities. It could be a simple temperature monitoring sensor, or it may be in the form of the video feed.

A device may have various types of sensors which performs multiple tasks apart from sensing. Example, A mobile phone is a device which has multiple sensors like GPS, camera but your smartphone is not able to sense these things.

2) Connectivity: All the collected data is sent to a cloud infrastructure. The sensors should be connected to the cloud using various mediums of communications. These communication mediums include mobile or satellite networks, Bluetooth, WI-FI, WAN, etc.

3) Data Processing: Once that data is collected, and it gets to the cloud, the software performs processing on the gathered data. This process can be just checking the temperature, reading on devices like AC or heaters. However, it can sometimes also be very complex like identifying objects, using computer vision on video.

4)User Interface: The information needs to be available to the end-user in some way which can be achieved by triggering alarms on their phones or sending them notification through email or text message. The user sometimes might need an interface which actively checks their IOT system. For example, the user has a camera installed in his home. He wants to access video recording and all the feeds with the help of a web server.

However, it's not always one-way communication. Depending on the IoT application and complexity of the system, the user may also be able to perform an action which may create cascading effects.