The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things Read Online Free PDF Page A

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    However, things with the Internet Protocol always starve for electrical power. The Internet Protocol needs electrons, voltage. Most “things” don’t have any wall plugs, and batteries are expensive impositions with short lives.
    It follows that most “things” are too humble and common to use the elaborate, aristocratic protocol of the Internet of Things. Lesser things have come to make do with alien protocols that use less electricity, such as MQTT, XMPP and DDS. These unruly “things” are like Balkan peasants muttering Albanian and Croat when their lords and masters want them to speak classical Latin.
    It gets worse: “things” without wires of course need some “wireless” to join the network. Wireless lurks in the planet’s radio spectrum in a Byzantine variety, in arcane, difficult variants such as WiFi and Bluetooth, and UltraWideband... and also WiMax, WiBro and RFID, and Zigbee… and the telecom protocols, too – the ever-mutating 2G, 3G and 4G. Every one of these protocols is a potential schism within the IoT empire. They’ve all attracted palace cliques of alliances and consortia anxious to promote their own interests.
    Plus, if you really want to get a machine to do something useful – to perform, as opposed to just sitting there “talking” to the Internet of Things – then it also needs some system of machine-to-machine commands. Digital machine-control software is fiercely complicated, not to mention potentially flammable, explosive and so on.
    So the devil is in the technical details – they’re not merely technical minutiae, something that pure-hearted engineers and efficient, impartial standards boards can fix in a jiffy. No, they are the focus points for energetic wrangling, schemes the wily players can adroitly use to screw each other over. 
    Despite these fault lines, there’s a feeling that the IoT just has to happen. Everybody near it sensed, with a vague theological conviction, that the internet was sure to see a whole lot of “thinging” once internet connectivity hit a certain price point: five bucks. For five lousy US dollars you can attach a thing to the internet! It’s fantastic, amazing, so different, such an advance! How could that not work out?
    Well, it doesn’t have to work. Back in the previous, failed Internet of Things Crusade – the doomed one with the RFID chips, as the reader may recall – the magic number was not five bucks, but five lousy cents. If you can put a chirping, electronic RFID barcode onto a thing for five cents, how can any Thing fail to be coded?
    It made wondrous technical sense: it didn’t work out. It was technically sweet, but the ethical, legal, social, political implications were unmanageable. The whole scheme collapsed in an all-too-human tangle of wrangle.
    However, that defeat’s been forgotten. Anyway, that was then, this is now. The new campaigners of the IoT are faster, stronger, smarter, better armed, and Wal-Mart and the Pentagon are keeping a low profile. Even the Big Five are by no means the whole story of the Internet of Things, although each desperately wishes it was.
    Let’s consider the means, motives and opportunities of some of these secondary players – the lesser dukes, earls, knights, mercenary captains and ambitious adventurers. They wrangle. A lot.
    Cisco should rank first among them because Cisco’s reframing of the situation has been brilliant. Its house version of the IoT is the IoE, the “Internet of Everything”. By this declaration, Cisco means all those minor, lesser “things” that the internet leaves out and overlooks.
    Cisco’s version of “cloud computing” has the interesting neologism “fog computing”. Cisco’s ambitions matter because, in point of technical fact, the legacy internet was never intended to deal with “things”, and Cisco knows that well.
    Real-world industrial processes need to be fast and accurate. They can’t hang around waiting for some community manager in