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.
