Is The Internet of Things Heading For Gridlock?
The rise of internet connected devices is resulting in data traffic jams. What can be done to open the airwaves?
Close your eyes for a moment, and picture your bathroom at home. Imagine scales that can record your weight and BMI before exporting them into an amended fitness plan, or a wall-mounted soap dispenser that automatically re-orders stock when supplies run low. Consider a toothbrush that tells your dentist how effectively you clean your teeth – as well as when, for how long, and using which techniques and that’s just the tip of the toothpaste tube!
Welcome to the Internet of Things (IoT)
While this might sound like the stuff of science fiction, it’s a reality that’s already with us courtesy of the Internet of Things. This catch-all term describes formerly passive offline devices equipped with wireless internet connectivity to record and upload data to the cloud, in an attempt to improve or simplify our lives through data gathering. Each of the products outlined above already exists on the open market, and each is reliant on internet-hosted algorithms or databases to make sense of the raw information it’s producing.
Slowing the Flow
If you’ve ever gritted your teeth while a YouTube video buffers, or experienced the sudden helplessness of a broadband outage, you’ll be aware that our outdated telephone and fiber broadband networks are already struggling to cope with existing technologies. The quantity of IoT-enabled devices is expected to double by 2020, by which time the total market could be worth $500 billion. Now people are beginning to ask whether the Internet of Things may be heading for gridlock. And if so, what can we do to tackle these issues?
Today’s connectivity has evolved in response to consumer demand and technological trends. However, it hasn’t taken into account the wide and local area networks responsible for piping all this data between network servers and recipient devices. Available bandwidth isn’t free or limitless, yet streamed media and VoIP services are competing with newly connected devices for the finite number of nodes and relays available for data transmission.
Another problem concerns our reliance on the Industrial Scientific and Medical radio band, which typically broadcasts at 2.4GHz across a transmitter network. Numerous devices use this unlicensed radio frequency technology, interfering with one another and slowing everything down.
To the Future!
In the same way that optimal road traffic management involves both preventing and detecting congestion, these twin approaches can also make a significant difference to existing internet resources. Innovations like engineered channel spacing have alleviated some of the pressure from ISM devices, while a growing number of bandwidth-hogging baby monitors are designed to transmit at 900MHz. Bluetooth 4.2 represents an alternative connection method for low-priority IoT devices where small amounts of data are being uploaded, and Huawei is developing a connectivity platform that can power IoT applications through the ‘white space’ gaps in television broadcasts. Research is continuing into frequencies below 1GHz and above 5GHz, though none of these approaches represents a truly long-term solution.
Data Transfer Solutions
Looking further into the future, the ultra-fast 5G network that’s expected to make its debut in 2020 could offer plentiful bandwidth with one millisecond round-trip latency. Alternatively, the IoT could be powered via Li-Fi, with standard domestic light bulbs providing lossless data transfers across line-of-sight environments.
Perhaps the huge infrastructure investments being made by cable and internet providers will eliminate today’s peak-time transfer speed drops, or maybe file compression will improve. Either way, it’s going to take a concerted effort from many quarters to prevent today’s information superhighway from becoming tomorrow’s traffic jam.