Developing Machine Connectivity: Obstacles and Prospects for the Internet of Things

The Internet has changed. Not anymore people’s communication tool, but device ‘communication. This is referred to as the Internet of things (IoT). However, there is another concept that comes into play when exploring IoT – the Web of Things (WoT). Unlike its predecessor though, WoT seeks to interweave IoT devices into the fabric of the World Wide Web. Therefore, we can achieve more accessibility and interconnectivity among machines.

Despite this, it’s not a simple process. In fact, it offers numerous challenges and opportunities.

The Barrier of Interoperability

Machine connectivity forms one main obstacle towards building a Web of Things. Unlike traditional web services, IoT devices come in all shapes and sizes with varying functions. As such; they have different communication protocols as well as data formats hence bringing them together for creating a consistent web across everything becomes difficult.

In WoT,HHTP and RDF are two standards that help in attaining interoperability where developers may use them to develop uniform interfaces for their IoT devices so that seamless interaction may occur between any networked thing.

Nevertheless, this still remains hard because older equipment might fail support modern protocols thus requiring backward compatibility mechanisms to be set up.

Security and Privacy Concerns

When considering how much can be attached on a network one must think about security risks that follow as well privacy concerns when using it.

It even gets worse from security perspective whereby every connected device becomes an entry point for cybercrimes hence need for strong protection measures across all connected devices since vulnerabilities will be exploited by attackers who seek to compromise your entire network.

There are various ways that could be used to address these problems including device level security features, network encryption methods and strict access controls given that such devices expose those which make up part of the WoT ecosystem .This makes it difficult for the system as a whole to gain trust over those vulnerable elements embedded in those machines. Please visit IXON (Germany) for more info.

Scalability and Resource Constraints

What we have now as the internet is also called edge computing. In other words, data processing is done at the source rather than relying on centralized cloud servers. Proven to reduce latency, minimize bandwidth consumption and enhance overall responsiveness of IoT connected devices.

However, doing this for all devices may not always solve everything. Especially when dealing with those that have limited processing power, memory capacity and energy sources.

For keeping the Web of Things scalable and robust though, efficient communication protocols and resource management strategies are still required. However, the use of lightweight messaging systems such as Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT)could help decrease these overheads that come with transmitting data over constrained networks.