Our everyday life will be improved using the internet connected devices around us.These devices would include one or more sensors which sends real time informations over the internet to cloud servers. These devices are called as “Internet of things”(IoT)
For example,
1. Hospitals can remotely monitor patient health using the smart device weared by the patient and can send medical advices to his phone as per the condition of his health. Even the hospitals can send ambulance in case of emergency signal received from the patient device.
2. Connected Street Lamp posts can include sensors like Sound sensors, Smoke detectors,Water level measuring sensors ,Temperature sensors etc and send the information to the cloud servers which can detect any incidents in real time.
3. A city administration can see how many outsiders currently roaming in the city and for what purpose they have came to the city. This will help to keep the law and order.
4. Car sensors can send health status to manufacturer in real time.The car manufacturer can send service team directly to the car location in case of any fault.
5. User can get the alerts from their home sensors and cameras.This would be very much helpful for families.
Now you should have understood what is “Internet of things (IoT)”. Right ? This evolution can even create new marketing techniques for businesses. For example, if a temperature sensor shows little higher temperature in home on summertime, air conditioner (AC) advertisement can be displayed in the user’s Monitoring app.
Cisco invested $100 Million :
Cisco is one of the early company to jump into the IoT. The company believes that it can grow its services business revenue from 20 to 30 percent through IoT services.
Cisco study shows that, by 2023, the total savings and sales would be up to $14.4 trillion in IoT business. Yes, Trillions.
Cisco said it has allocated $100 million to invest in the IoT startup companies to improve the connected world. This will also increase their hardware business revenue as well.
Cisco’s Fog Computing (Router + Server) :
Cisco created a router architecture called “IOx” which combines router and server. These new routers locally run the applications and store the data to serve IoT sensors/devices by staying closer to the sensors .
For example, a home smoke sensor would send “OK -normal” messages continuously to the server. No need to send all these millions of “OK” messages to cloud server continuously. Right? The router is enough to acknowledge these messages. In case of any smoke detection in the house , the message will be sent to cloud server via the router to alert the user.
IOx architecture has a linux based operating system which works along with cisco’s traditional IOS (Internetworking Operating System).
Cisco announced the IOx architecture, at the utility-industry trade show Distributech in San Antonio, Texas. Cisco’s IoT routers with IOx architecture will start shipping in the first half of this year.
Users can use different types of connections for IoT devices such as zigbee, bluetooth, zwave. Users can integrate these interfaces in the linux based IOx architecture easier. Using Cisco’s IOx SDK, users can write their own applications for the routers to create a IoT service.