Common IoT device form factors include standalone sensors, consumer appliances with embedded sensors, industrial equipment sensors, wireless cameras, and beacons. The number and types of IoT devices continue to grow rapidly as new use cases emerge across various industries. Manufacturers are developing increasingly specialized devices optimized for applications such as supply chain logistics, precision agriculture, smart cities, healthcare, and more. While basic connectivity is needed, many IoT devices also have processing and storage onboard to support local analytics and actions without relying entirely on remote cloud services.

IoT Networks: Connecting Devices to the Cloud

With devices able to sense the environment and report data, IoT Infrastructure reliable networking infrastructure is required to move all that information to centralized systems for analysis and action. Numerous network technologies have emerged to support the varied needs of IoT connectivity across different deployment scenarios.

Low-power wide-area networks (LPWANs) like LoRaWAN and NB-IoT are ideal for use cases where long battery life is paramount over bandwidth needs. These networks support multi-year battery lives for stationary sensors whilst still enabling communications over large geographic areas. Cellular networks have also expanded LTE-M and 5G capabilities tailored for IoT.

Where bandwidth demands are higher, short-range technologies like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Zigbee play an important role. Industrial environments in particular leverage mesh networking radios to collect data across large equipment installations or facility footprints. Satellite connectivity further extends IoT coverage to extremely remote locations lacking terrestrial infrastructure.

Edge computing is also strengthening IoT Infrastructure by shifting some processing and storage tasks to localized edge nodes rather than solely relying on remote cloud infrastructure. This improves response times, reliability, security, and data residency for latency-sensitive scenarios. Overall, IoT networking complexity grew due to the variety of specialty protocols, yet integration is simplifying with more multi-radio device options and network virtualization technologies.

IoT Platforms: Organizing the Data Deluge

The real power of IoT comes from collecting massive volumes of raw data from connected devices and transforming that into meaningful insights. IoT platforms play a central role in this data orchestration process. At the core, platforms provide infrastructure to reliably ingest streaming data from devices and networks, process it using tools like stream processing, and store it cost-effectively for analytics use.
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