Читать книгу Building the Internet of Things - Kranz Maciej - Страница 7

For many people, the first time they heard about IoT was in the business media or at a business conference. But IoT isn't actually new. It has been around for years, in various forms. Banks run large, distributed automated teller machine (ATM) networks. Retailers operate large point-of-sale (POS) networks, as well as extensive deployments of radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags to track the movement of millions of inventory items. Manufacturers connect thousands of devices to monitor and manage production in machine-to-machine (M2M) networks. Utilities deploy connected sensors and meters to enable everything from customer billing to maintenance troubleshooting. Each network could amount to tens of thousands of connected devices.

Nobody referred to these initial networks as IoT, and there were significant differences. Typically, they dealt with only one type of connected device or one application, had a very limited and tightly defined set of functions, and often used proprietary protocols rather than IP or the cloud, which have become the dominant networking and computing options today. Still, these amounted to early large-scale attempts to connect devices with some level of built-in intelligence and communication for the purpose of managing critical business functions. They were the forerunners of what we think of as IoT today. As expected, not all initial IoT-driven efforts were successful. From the GE-Cisco Industrial Ethernet joint venture, to location-based digital advertising platforms, to active RFID implementations in retail, and to ambitious plans for smart cities, many concepts incubated in the early 2000s were for one reason or another ahead of their time. However, as IoT matured over the following decade, the more robust technologies, solutions, and business models were subsequently developed and increasingly adopted.

As I recall, an IoT term might have been coined in late 1990s to describe the emerging RFID networks. To be honest, six years ago, when Cisco was deciding how to best describe the trend of devices, machines, or things connecting to each other over the IP networks and, ultimately, to the Internet, it chose not to invent a new term. Cisco simply decided to adopt the original Internet of Things idea and apply it to the phenomenon we were seeing at the time. In effect, we morphed the IoT of yesterday to define the IoT of today – the next stage of the Internet.

The first generation of Internet adopters also didn't use the term IoT to describe the type of business transformations that are taking place now. Then, as I said, about six years ago things began to accelerate on the network connectivity front. The first stage of the Internet was in full swing, driven by the rise of cloud computing and the growing adoption of smartphones and tablets with the goal of enabling us to connect to each other, to the data, to the processes, and to the services we were using. The devices, however, were already pointing the way to the second stage of the Internet – the IoT we see emerging today.

We now have a robust standards-based global networking infrastructure and a myriad of connected devices from all sorts of sensors, meters, actuators, to cars, buses, robots, drills, MRI machines, office buildings, entire cities, even garbage cans – those assets can not only communicate but also generate and often process data and interface with a mind-boggling array of applications. And people have begun to adopt IoT terminology to recognize this phenomenon, the breadth of its scope and capabilities. IoT today is becoming pervasive.

You can clearly see a transformative power of IoT in the auto industry. Have you bought a new car lately? Well, the car is becoming a smartphone on wheels. Cars have long collected data from standalone subsystems and used processors embedded at various points to monitor and manage different functions. Car manufacturers are now installing standards-based high speed deterministic networks to connect all of these subsystems, the data they produce, and processing power into what amounts to a mobile datacenter. They're also connecting these mobile datacenters to the Internet. Pretty soon, every new car will be both smart and connected.

Remember when you bought a car based on its style or maybe key specs such as horsepower or its miles-per-gallon (MPG) rating? If you haven't bought a new car lately, your current car – I hate to tell you – is a dinosaur plodding along a path to extinction. If a car lacks even a Bluetooth interface, its trade-in value will be considerably lower. Car-buying criteria have changed completely for the majority of buyers. The electronics and device connectivity make a car appealing today. Similar changes are sweeping other industries. And it's due to the rise of IoT.

Now when we purchase a new car, we're actually buying, as I noted, a smartphone on wheels (Figure 1.4) and a mobile datacenter. Looks and style are important, of course, but for the majority of us speed and performance are secondary. What we really care about is how we interact with the car and how we automate tasks. We also care about how the car interacts with us – telling us when to change the oil based not on the mileage but on the actual use of oil. The car should warn us, and the dealer, that a part in the engine is about to break before it happens. And in the next few years we should expect an electric car to just pick us up and drive us wherever we want to go. Everything else becomes an afterthought.

Figure 1.4 Smartphone on Wheels

Asit Goel, senior vice president and general manager at NXP Semiconductors, responsible for the firm's IOT solutions, summarized this new world well: “Ultimately, technology needs to replace or augment the senses of a human driver in a smart connected car. An army of sensors, radars, laser scanners, cameras, computing processors, wireless and cellular communications devices is needed to do this, to gain a 360-degree view of the car's surroundings and make critical decisions. The car isn't just a thing anymore; it's a system of things that delivers this hyper-connected experience with greater fluidity of service across my personal device, professional environments, and more.”

Is the auto industry ready for such a dramatic transformation? Ford Motor Company's James Buczkowski, a Henry Ford Technical Fellow and director, Electrical and Electronics Systems Research and Advanced Engineering, has emerged as a thought leader on automotive electronics, including connected and autonomous vehicles. He assured me that the industry is comprehensively addressing smart mobility, which includes user experience, software, cyber security, data analytics and working toward new emerging mobility business models.