IEEE Future Directions
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The bit economy is fueled by sensors, converting atoms into bits. According to General Electric and Cisco there will be a trillion sensors active at the end of this decade.
The data economy is fueled by virtual sensors. Now a sensor may be passive, you need to look at its value to get it, or it may be active, it can transmit the new value as soon as it detects a change.
Same goes for a Virtual Sensor. It can be the result of a computation that needs to be inspected or such a result can be transmitted to potential users.
What is important to notice is that we are already surrounded by sensors. Most of the time the issue is not about the existence of a data, rather having the possibilityof getting and using it. This, in turns, involves the availability of some sort of communication technology and the existence of a regulatory framework, protecting the owner as well as enabling the data exploitation.
Consider a smartphone. It may contain some 14 different types of sensors (accelerator, gyroscope, GPS, light presence, microphone, thermal, mechanical, optical -cameras-, capacitive, pressure, electromagnetic, biometrics…). The variety of data that can be produced by a smartphone is staggering and so is the potential of information that can be derived from their analyses. Imagine from a moment the possibility to use the microphone to analyse the sounds in the smartphone surrounding. A signal processing application can detect the presence of cars, trucks moving around and even pinpoint their make and brand! This data associated with the location data provided by GPS can generate information on the level of traffic in a certain location. That same smartphone movements can generate information if it is attached to a walking person or transported in a public bus or on a car. This information, in turns can provide further hints on the heavvyness of traffic, the presence of traffic jams, the on time schedule of a bus and much more.
Of course, this is all in the realm of “potential”. To make this a reality you need a regulatory framework and the “trust” of the smartphone owner.
Sensors are making a significant portion of IoT, and is a way we can say that any IoT is a sensor of some sort.
We do not have a uniformly accepted definition of IoT.As an example, would you consider a smartphone as an IoT or it has to be seen as a device? Take into consideration the fact that as IoT it connects to the the Internet, it has a unique identity… Whatever your pick go a step forward. Would you consider the sensors embedded in the smartphone as IoT? They can have a unique identity (inherited from the smartphone) and they can communicate the data to the Internet…. Notice that if we were to count as IoT sensors within a Smartphone we would have today 40 billion IoT just looking at toady’s smartphones….
For some, smartphones (and their embedded sensors) are not considered as IoT (but as devices). Be what it may, there is unanimous consensus that the number of IoT (whatever they are) is growing (see the graph, but keep in mind that given the diversity of opinions on what IoT are you find different graphs with different values).
Saying that we will have 20, or 50 or 1,000 billion IoT by 2020, however, is not saying much in terms of “so what”? To understand their possibile implication we would need to consider the variety, volume and frequency (velocity) of the data produced (a temperature sensor may produce a few hundred bytes, if not less, per day, whilst a digital camera sensor may produce tens of GB per day) and of course we should factor in only those that are made accessible.
The scenario gets even fuzzier but what is important to notice is that the availability of data will depend more from the regulatory environment (and people’s trust) than from technology.
