We technicians almost solved the Internet, so we became very boring. You know, when a group of technicians becomes bored, they are keen to find another difficult problem.
In the world of IoT, we realize that the network has not yet conquered what is really important to us—the world we interact with every day—the real world. Now, a series of challenges will at least allow our technicians to fight for another decade.
I think the real world's main challenge for the Internet of Things is not rooted in inter-networking, but how to drive things to affect network connectivity and software programming, especially in the case of wireless.
Battery and Internet of Things
Obviously, rechargeable batteries are driving the development of consumer-oriented IoT.
The iPhone has to be powered for a few hours a day, allowing it to connect to a cellular network or WiFi, and access the Internet via TCP/IP, which does not seem to drastically change the network or programming method. Fitbit communicates with other devices via Bluetooth, charging only a few minutes a day, which has a dramatic impact on the network and software programming model.
But what if I tell you that the battery has to be recharged or replaced for one month? 6 months, 2 years, 5 years? Is this crazy? Who would require a wearable device to last for a long time without charging?
Consider these very realistic industrial IoT applications: monitoring soil and disease conditions in almond trees orchards, monitoring cow disease, predictive maintenance of air compressor modifications in the plant, including crane monitoring, engine performance monitoring, or fire extinguisher monitoring. Over-the-top services (Internet-based enterprises use the basic network of traditional telecom operators to directly provide services to users). In these scenarios, the environment in which the device is located is required to be connected to the power supply for more than 6 months (in some cases, 5 years).
To tell the truth, over-the-top service is very interesting as a business model. Traditional companies that sell cranes, fire extinguishers and cars expect their products to be smarter and networked for more service revenue or to build closer relationships with customers. But they want to be able to install their products without interfering with existing infrastructure, which means that the entire category of industrial applications requires longer battery life.
How to make your battery life longer
Buying a large battery is certainly a method, but it is usually neither practical nor cost-effective. More design methods can be attributed to the following three aspects:
Use a low power processor with advanced sleep control
Use low-power RF technology that precisely controls TX/RX (transmit/receive) time
Control the power consumption of sensors and brake peripherals
In other words, as long as possible in low-power mode, there is enough time to read sensor data, send information, and then turn off all devices. This is related to managing the duty cycle of the battery (the proportion of the power-on time in one pulse cycle).
How to weigh?
Of course, the first principle of engineering is that if you want to get something, you have to give up something else and always have a balance – in this case, traditional network connections and software programming must be used to exchange long battery life. .
WiFi and TCP/IP really don't help you to control the battery duty cycle very well. WiFi needs to spend RF time to lock the access point. TCP needs to use the handshake protocol to establish the connection before sending data, and the protocol overhead is required to ensure reliability. These processes cost precious RF and processor time, and time is not spent transmitting data, but building connections and reliability.
You can consider using UDP (User Datagram Protocol) as an alternative, but it still wastes time and does not guarantee reliability.
Some alternative network solutions that can shorten the "ON" duty cycle are:
Fire and forget: If reliability is not a big problem, then this is the option to minimize power.
Time synchronization transmission (TIme synchronized transmission): avoid conflicts
A backbone of powered repeaters to relay messages: the reliability between the battery powered node and the power node takes less time
The implementation of these and other non-traditional network solutions means that there must be other solutions to ensure reliability. The good news is that there are emerging standards for managing these things at the physical, connectivity, and network layers, but don't expect them to work the way we used to, and there must be additional tools and algorithms to reliably collect data in the future.
Traditional operating systems do not support fast sleep/wake cycles, nor do they handle these limited RAM & flash memories. Decision logic for objects will be driven by embedded software and key events: a programming paradigm that is unfamiliar to traditional IT developers.
The question is not how to drive an IoT platform, but an IoT platform should be able to easily extend battery life by some means, right?
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