Physical Design and Protocols of IOT |Brothers Study Zone

Physical design principles of iot

For designers focused on designing SW services and screen based interfaces or physical products,  designing  IoT solutions creates totally new design challenges. IoT solutions consist of multiple elements: physical devices like sensors, actuators and interactive devices, the network connecting these devices, the data gathered from these devices and analyzed to create a meaningful experience and last but definitely not least, the physical context in which user interacts with the solution. You need to do various types of design, from industrial product design to service and business design. All of these factors have their impact to the total UX of the IoT system and the task of designing in this context may feel quite overwhelming. To make it a little easier, I have gathered my list of the 7 most important design principles for IoT.

1. Focus on value

In the world of IoT, user research and service design are more crucial than ever. While early adopters are eager to try out new technology, many others are reluctant to take new technology into use and cautious about using it, due to not feeling confident with it. For your IoT solution to become widely adopted, you need to dig deep into users’ needs in order to find out where lies a problem truly worth solving and what is the real end user value of the solution. You also need to understand what might be the barriers of adopting the new technology in general and your solution specifically. For deciding on your feature set, you need research too. The features that might be valuable and highly relevant for the tech early adopters may be uninteresting for the majority of the users and vice versa, so you need to plan carefully what features to include and in which order.

2. Take a holistic view

IoT solutions typically consist of multiple devices with different capabilities and both physical and digital touchpoints. The solution may also be provided in co-operation with multiple different service providers. It is not enough to design one of the touchpoints well, instead you need to take a holistic look across the whole system, the role of each device and service, and the conceptual model of how user understands and perceives the system. The whole system needs to work seamlessly together in order to create a meaningful experience.

3. Put safety first

As the IoT solutions are placed in the real-world context, the consequences can be serious, when something goes wrong. At the same time the users of the IoT solutions may be vary of using new technology, so building trust should be one of your main design drivers. Trust is built slowly and lost easily, so you really need to make sure that every interaction with the product/service builds the trust rather than breaks it. What it means in practice? First of all, it means understanding possible error situations related to context of use, HW, SW and network as well as to user interactions and trying to prevent them. Secondly, if the error situations still occur, it means appropriately informing the user about them and helping them to recover. Secondly, it means considering data security & privacy as key elements of your design. It is really important for users to feel, that their private data is safe, their home, working environment and everyday objects cannot be hacked and their loved ones are not put at risk. Thirdly, quality assurance is critical and it should not only focus on testing the SW, but on testing the end to end system, in a real-world context.

4. Consider the context

IoT solutions exist at the crossroads of the physical and digital worlds. Commands given through digital interfaces may produce real world effects, but unlike digital commands, the actions happening in the real-world cannot necessarily be undone. In the real-worldcontext, lots of unexpected things can happen and at the same time user should be able to feel safe and in control. The context places also other kind of requirements to the design. Depending on the physical context, the goal might be to minimize distraction of the user or e.g. to design devices that hold up against changing weather conditions. IoT solutions in homes, workplaces and public areas are typically multi-user systems and thus less personal than e.g. screen-based solutions used in smart phones, which also brings into picture the social context where the solution is used and its’ requirements for the design.

5. Build a strong brand

Due to the real-world context of the IoT solutions, regardless of how carefully you design things and aim to build trust, something unexpected will happen at some point and your solution is somehow going to fail. In this kind of situations, it is of utmost importance, that you have built a strong brand that truly resonates with the end users. When they feel connected to your brand, they will be more forgiving about the system failures and will still keep on using your solution. While designing your brand, you must keep in mind, that trust should be a key element of the brand, one of the core brand values. This core value should also be reflected in the rest of the brand elements, like the choice of color, tone of voice, imagery etc.

6. Prototype early and often

Typically, HW and SW have quite different life spans, but as successful IoT solution needs both the HW and SW elements, the life spans should be aligned. At the same time, IoT solutions are hard to upgrade, because once the connected object is placed somewhere, it is not so easy to replace it with a newer version, especially if the user would need to pay for the upgrade and even the software within the connected object may be hard to update due to security and privacy reasons. Due to these factors and to avoid costly hardware iterations, it’s crucial to get the solution right, from the beginning of implementation. What this means from the design perspective is that prototyping and rapid iteration of both the HW and the whole solution are essential in the early stages of the project. New, more creative ways of prototyping and faking the solution are needed.

7. Use data responsibly

IoT solutions can easily generate tons of data. However, the idea is not to hoard as much data as possible, but instead to identify the data points that are needed to make the solution functional and useful. Still, the amount of data may be vast, so it’s necessary for the designer to understand the possibilities of data science and how to make sense of the data. Data science provides a lot of opportunities to reduce user friction, i.e. reducing use of time, energy and attention or diminishing stress. It can be used to automate repeated context dependent decisions, to interpret intent from incomplete/inadequate input or to filter meaningful signals from noise. Understanding what data is available and how it can be used to help the user is a key element in designing successful IoT services.

INTRODUCTION to IOT protocols 

The IoT system can perform and transfer information only when they are in online mode i.e. when devices in IoT are safely connected to communication network. Here the question arises that how such connection is possible and what sort of connections are available for making these thousands of devices to communicate with each other. The answer for these entire questions is PROTOCOL. We can say that protocols enable these devices to communicate with each other and many protocols have been introduced so far and continuously many protocols are being introduced. So in this article are to going to discuss about IoT networks requirements, different type of protocols used in IoT and brief description about commonly used protocols in Internet of Things.

IOT NETWORKS REQUIREMENTS

Some mandatory requirements to build an IoT network are listed below:

 It should be scalable i.e. can connect a large number of devices

It should be highly reliable

It should support data transmission in real time with minimized delays

It should be able to protect data flows

It should be capable of configuring applications

Traffic management and monitoring at device level

It should be cost effective so that large number of devices can be connected.

IOT PROTOCOLS

Although a number of iot protocols are used in IoT but here we will be discussing some widely used protocols in Internet of Things which are listed below:

MQTT (message queue telemetry transport)

DDS (data distribution service)

AMQP (advance message queuing protocol)

Bluetooth

Zigbee

Wi-Fi

Cellular

LoRaWAN

So let’s discuss these protocols in detail.

MQTT:

So the first IOT protocol we are going to explain is MQTT (message queue telemetry transport). It is light weight protocol and used for sending data from sensors to middleware and applications. It works on top of TCP / IP in order for providing reliable delivery of data. It has three main components

Subscriber

Publisher

Broker

So the basic workflow of this protocol is that the publisher is responsible for generating and transmission of information to subscribers through broker. The main function of broker is to ensure security by checking authorization of subscribers and publishers. This protocol is preferred for IoT devices because it provides well-organized information routing function to cheap, small, low memory and power devices and also low bandwidth networks.

DDS:

DDS stands for data distribution service. In IoT it is used for scalable, real-time and for machine – machine high performance. This protocol can be used in devices as well as in cloud. It consists of two main layers:

DCPS i.e. data centric publish subscriber. It is used for delivering information to the subscribers

DLRL i.e. data local reconstruction layer. It is used for providing an interface to the functions of DCPS.

AMQP:

AMQP stands for advance message queuing protocol. If we consider OSI model of internet architecture then this protocol is used at application layer. The processing of this protocol consists of three main components following some set of rules.

Exchange: to receive messages and putting them in queues

Message queue: for storing messages unless and until they are safely processed by the client applications

Binding: it defines the relationship of exchange and message queue i.e. first and second component.

BLUETOOTH:

It is also a very famous IOT protocol. It is a commonly used short range communication technology and is used mostly in mobile devices and smart phones. It is mostly used in personal products. This technology is real foundation for IoT and was designed in order to minimize power consumption. It is flexible and scalable to almost all market inventions. A new important protocol to use in IoT is Bluetooth Smart or BLE (Bluetooth low energy). Some are some important points related to this protocol

Uses Bluetooth 4.2 standard

Frequency is of about 2.4 GHz

Range is from 50 – 150m in case of smart Bluetooth or Bluetooth low energy

Data rate is of 1 Mbps for smart or low energy Bluetooth

ZIGBEE:

Another protocol we are going to discuss is Zigbee 3.0. The universal language for IoT was created by Zigbee alliance known as Dotdot. This language enabled smart devices to work seamlessly and securely on any type of network by understanding each other. Zigbee 3.0 has following features

It is a low power protocol

Comes in the category of wireless protocol offering low data rates

Mostly used in industrial settings

Zigbee 3.0 is based on IEEE 802.15.4 standard

Frequency is of about 2.4 GHz

Range is from 10 – 100 m for Zigbee 3.0

Data rate is about 250 kbps.

Wi-Fi:

In LAN environments, the mostly used type of connectivity is Wi-Fi. It is the technology which is used in radio wireless networking of devices. Below are some features of this protocol

Fast data transfer is offered by this protocol

It can be used to process large amount of data

It is based on IEEE 802.11 standard

Frequencies are of about 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands

Range is approximately 50 m.

Data rate are about 150 – 200 Mbps and can offer up to maximum of 600 Mbps.

Cellular:

The base of every mobile phone network is cellular technology. It is also used in Internet of Things applications which are designed to perform over large distance. These applications take benefit from the cellular communication technology such as 2 G, 3 G, 4 G and now 5G is going to launch soon. Some features of this protocol are given below:

This technology is capable for transferring large amount of data

High power consumption

This technology is most suitable for projects which send small amount of information so that power consumption is low.

Standards used in 2 G are GSM / EDGE / GPRS

Standards used in 3 G are UMTS / HSPA

Standard used in 4 G is LTE

Frequencies can lie about 900 / 1800 / 1900 / 2100 MHz

For GSM range is about 35 km and for HSPA it is about 200 km

Data rate for GPRS is 35 – 170 Kbps, for EDGE 120 – 384 Kbps, for UMTS 384 Kbps – 2 Mbps, for HSPA 600 Kbps – 10 Mbps and for LTE 3 – 10 Mbps

LoRaWAN:

Long range wide area network (LoRaWAN) is a protocol which is used for wide area networks. It is designed in such a way that it supports a huge amount of networks having millions of low power devices. Some features of this protocol are listed below:

It is based on LoRaWAN standard

It can operate on various frequencies

Range of this protocol is 2 – 5 km in urban areas and 15 km in suburban areas

Data rates lie in the range of 0.3 – 50 Kbps

SOME OTHER IOT PROTOCOLS

UDP: stands for user data gram protocol. In reference to OSI model we can link this protocol to transport layer and is an alternative to TCP but it is unreliable but provide fast transmission of data and is one of the oldest protocol

QUIC: for supporting multiplexed connections between two hosts over user datagram gram protocol (UDP) and for providing security

IPv6: used in packet switched network and provide end to end datagram transmission over multiple IP networks

DLTS (datagram transport layer): used to provide communication privacy in datagram protocol

Nano-IP: e. Nano internet protocol was designed to bring internet services to sensors and embedded systems

That’s all for this article. Hopefully you enjoyed reading this article. Any queries or comments related to this article can be asked in the comment section below. Thanks and happy reading. In coming tutorial, we will discuss in details all IOT protocols and their structure.