The Internet of Things (IoT)

A thing, in the Internet of Things (physical devices), can be a person with a heart monitor implant, a farm animal with a biochip transponder, an automobile that has built-in sensors to alert the driver when tire pressure is low -- or any other natural or man-made object that can be assigned an IP address and provided with the ability to exchange data over a network. IoT has developed from the confluence of wireless technologies, micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS), microservices and the internet. The confluence has helped to dismantle the silo walls between operational technology (OT) and information technology (IT), allowing unstructured machine-generated data (Physical data) to be analysed for insights that will drive improvements. Kevin Ashton, cofounder and executive director of the Auto-ID Center at MIT, first mentioned the Internet of Things in a presentation he made to Procter & Gamble in 1999. Here’s how Ashton explains the potential of the Internet of Things: “Today computers -- and, therefore, the internet -- are almost wholly dependent on human beings for information. Nearly all of the roughly 50 petabytes (a petabyte is 1,024 terabytes) of data available on the internet were first captured and created by human beings by typing, pressing a record button, taking a digital picture or scanning a bar code.

The problem is, people have limited time, attention and accuracy -- all of which means they are not very good at capturing data about things in the real world. If we had computers that knew everything there was to know about things -- using data they gathered without any help from us -- we would be able to track and count everything and greatly reduce waste, loss and cost. We would know when things needed replacing, repairing or recalling and whether they were fresh or past their best.” In case of IPv6 there is huge increase in address space and it can be considered as an important factor in the development of the Internet of Things. Address space expansion in IPV6 assure that we can address to every atom on the surface of the earth, and still have enough addresses left. In other words, humans could easily assign an IP address to every "thing" on the planet. Also there are more number of issues one should take care about are data privacy, data sovereignty and security due to increase in the number of smart nodes, as well as the amount of upload data the nodes generate. Although the concept wasn't named until 1999, the Internet of Things has been developing for decades. The first internet appliance, was a Coke machine at Carnegie Melon University in the early 1980s. The machine could connect over network and programmers were able to check the status of the machine and determine whether or not there would be a cold drink awaiting them, should they decide to make the trip down to the machine. Few of the practical application of IoT are listed below:
• Media
• Environment monitoring
• Infrastructure Management
• Energy Management
• Medical and healthcare
• Transportation