2 B] With a neat diagram, explain the interdependency technology for IoT planes.
IoT is a paradigm built upon complex interdependencies of technologies (both legacy and modern), which occur at various planes of this paradigm. Regarding Figure 8, we can divide the IoT paradigm into four planes: services, local connectivity, global connectivity, and processing.
Services Plane:
If we consider a bottom-up view, the services offered fall under the control and purview of service providers. The service plane is composed of two parts: 1) things or devices and 2) low-power connectivity
• Typically, the services offered in this layer are a combination of things and low-power connectivity. For example, any IoT application requires the basic setup of sensing, followed by rudimentary processing (often), and a low-power, low-range network, which is mainly built upon the IEEE 802.15.4 protocol.
• The things may be wearables, computers, smartphones, household appliances, smart glasses, factory machinery, vending machines, vehicles, UAVs, robots, and other such contraptions (which may even be just a sensor).
• The immediate low-power connectivity, which is responsible for connecting the things in local implementation, may be legacy protocols such as WiFi, Ethernet, or cellular. In contrast, modern-day technologies are mainly wireless and often programmable such as Zigbee, RFID, Bluetooth, 6LoWPAN, LoRA, DASH, Insteon, and others. The range of these connectivity technologies is severely restricted; they are responsible for the connectivity between the things of the IoT and the nearest hub or gateway to access the Internet.
Local connectivity plane:
• The local connectivity is responsible for distributing Internet access to multiple local IoT deployments. This distribution may be on the basis of the physical placement of the things, on the basis of the application domains, or even on the basis of providers of services.
• Services such as address management, device management, security, sleep scheduling, and others fall within the scope of this plane. For example, in a smart home environment, the first floor and the ground floor may have local IoT implementations, which have various things connected to the network via low-power, low-range connectivity technologies. The traffic from these two floors merges into a single router or a gateway. The total traffic intended for the Internet from a smart home leaves through a single gateway or router, which may be assigned a single global IP address (for the whole house). This helps in the significant conservation of already limited global IP addresses.
• The local connectivity plane falls under the purview of IoT management as it directly deals with strategies to use/reuse addresses based on things and applications.
The modern-day “edge computing” paradigm is deployed in conjunction with these first two planes: services and local connectivity.
Global connectivity plane:
• In continuation, the plane of global connectivity plays a significant role in enabling IoT in the real sense by allowing for worldwide implementations and connectivity between things, users, controllers, and applications.
• This plane also falls under the purview of IoT management as it decides how and when to store data, when to process it, when to forward it, and in which form to forward it.
• The Web, datacenters, remote servers, Cloud, and others make up this plane.
The paradigm of “fog computing” lies between the planes of local connectivity and global connectivity. It often serves to manage the load of global connectivity infrastructure by offloading the computation nearer to the source of the data itself, which reduces the traffic load on the global Internet.
Processing plane:
The final plane of processing can be considered as a top-up of the basic IoT networking framework. The continuous rise in the usefulness and penetration of IoT in various application areas such as industries, transportation, healthcare, and others are the result of this plane.
• The members in this plane may be termed as IoT tools, simply because they wring-out useful and human-readable information from all the raw data that flows from various IoT devices and deployments.
• The various sub-domains of this plane include intelligence, conversion (data and format conversion, and data cleaning), learning (making sense of temporal and spatial data patterns), cognition (recognizing patterns and mapping it to already known patterns), algorithms (various control and monitoring algorithms), visualization (rendering numbers and strings in the form of collective trends, graphs, charts, and projections), and analysis (estimating the usefulness of the generated information, making sense of the information with respect to the application and place of data generation, and estimating future trends based on past and present patterns of information obtained).
• Various computing paradigms such as “big data”, “machine learning”, and others, fall within the scope of this domain.