From the course: IoT Foundations: Fundamentals
Architectural overview
- [Instructor] The Internet of Things is a complex technology that's never too far away from business. First, the definition. The Internet of Things is simply an extension of the current Internet, further into our physical world, into things. Although technology is an evolution, the business is a revolution. So, when you hear all the hype, it's real. The Internet of Things is segmented by B2C, or business to consumer IoT, and B2B, or business to business IoT. B2C IoT is consumer IoT, where B2B is commercial, industrial, and infrastructure IoT. In the Internet of Things, there's three kinds of products. We have our smart products, connected products, and our IoT products. In this course, I'm going to be talking about the IoT product. We've had smart products for over half a century. Simply just having an embedded device, doesn't create that much value. Connected products have been around a long time, too. However, it's debatable how much value is associated with just being able to connect your, let's say, dryer, to your smartphone. With the Internet of Things, we can apply a lot more value to our products. The traditional engineering view has been to look at IoT similar as a networking stack, going from the media layer, through the networking layer, to the application layer. However, this focuses more on the plumbing. That's not really where the value is. Historically, if you were a designer, or a system integrator, it gets a little bit closer. There's a front end. That's for the users. There's a back end, for the actual customers. And, in between, there's all the enabling technology. However, I think there's a better view, looking at it from a value perspective. Before jumping too far into the tech, it's useful to start out with some basics, and then jump into the big picture. The business view of the IoT product, segments it into four parts, the software-defined, and the hardware-defined product, that are connected by the network fabric and interface the external systems. The tech of an IoT product is either collecting data or transforming it into useful information. The hardware-defined product and external systems collects data and transports it through the network fabric, to the software-defined product, where it's transformed, along with analytics, into value. I'll be going into far more detail into each of these four components throughout the course.
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