In connected things era where every product owners and service providers are coming up with their own flavor of connected things platform, its becoming difficult for developers, prototyping team and end users to create, use and leverage the full potential of concept of internet of things.
The platform could be hardware and software. In terms of the technology and engineering aspects of IoT, there currently exists a clear separation between the hardware and software platforms, with the majority of vendors focused on the hardware. Few vendors in the industry currently offer IoT software platforms: for example, out of the top 100 IoT startups ranked by Mattermark (based on the total funding they received), only about 13 startups provide IoT software platforms.
In its simplest form, an IoT platform is just about enabling connectivity between “things” or devices and humans. The architecture may also consist of a software platform, an application development platform or an analytics platform. In a more sophisticated form, a true end-to-end IoT platform consists of eight important architectural building blocks:
Source:https://iot-analytics.com
Expectations from IoT Sotware platform:-
Based on the study I am able to list down following features which are necessary ingredients of a good IoT Platform:-
1) Protocols Support:
The platform should be capable of listening sensors, devices, and gateways on various protocols available. The protocols support can be segregated in two parts.
A) Type of communications/interface like RS232, RS485, Ethernet, Wi-Fi, BLE, ZigBee etc
B) Structure of data communications like SNMP, MQTT, CoAP etc
Example: The data transmission interface may be cellular and data structure may be MQTT.
The platform should decode and support both type of protocols support.
2) Visualization:
Making easier to generate a visualization and creating dashboard easily in few clicks by developers and end-users. The end users may not be interested in creating and changing the dashboards but they usually want this option handy to try.
3) Device Management:
The platform should maintain and give options to manage the devices by configuration, firmware upgrades, error logging and reporting, seamlessly running patches.
4) Data Analytics:
The platform must be able to performs a range of complex analysis from basic data clustering and deep machine learning to predictive analytics extracting the most value out of the IoT data-stream. There are four main types of analytics which can be conducted on IoT data: real-time, batch, predictive, and interactive analytics. These all helps in realizing the data-monetization.
5) Data security:
The network connection between the IoT devices and the IoT software platform would need to be encrypted with a strong encryption mechanism to avoid potential eavesdropping. most of the low-cost, low-powered devices involved in modern IoT software platforms cannot support such advanced access control measures. Therefore the IoT software platform itself needs to implement alternative measures to handle such device level issues.
