IoT Device Platform: World Practices and Recommendations for Vietnam
Source: Trần Quốc Tuấn, aita.gov.vn, 2022
The Internet of Things or IoT are concepts that have not been strange to Vietnamese people in recent years. However, everything is new at the conceptual level, the practical application is still limited. Along with that, in Vietnam, there is no separate legal framework or management base for IoT and this is also an important issue that needs to be dealt with soon.
General awareness
To really properly understand and implement IoT effectively, it is necessary to look back at what IoT is. In the simplest terms, IoT is the connection of devices to the Internet and the connection between them through sensors. All hand-held devices to refrigerators, washing machines, coffee makers to toasters and pretty much any other device we humans use every day with sensors and an Internet connection. can become a link in IoT. According to Business Insider, forecasts suggest that by 2027 there will be more than 41 billion connected devices. Therefore, IoT is essentially a huge network of connected devices, and to understand the complexity of IoT as well as the urgent need to manage this ecosystem properly, it is necessary to consider its components. make up this huge network of connected devices. The following nine factors always require higher management requirements for IoT devices: gateway; connectivity of devices; user interface; IoT cloud; data analysis; standardization, protocolization; database; automation in the ecosystem and interoperability.
Gateway management is the easiest way to manage data traffic between IoT devices and networks. Through network protocols, it is easy to manage ensuring that devices and sensors are connected stably. Gateways can also work to pre-process data from sensors and send them to the next layer, as well as provide encryption appropriate to network flows and data transmission.
The main components that complete the connectivity layer are the sensors and devices. The sensors collect the information and send it to the next layer where it is processed. With the advancement of technology, semiconductor technology allows the production of smart micro-sensors that can be used for a number of applications such as: proximity detection, humidity or humidity level sensing, sensing temperature sensors and thermostats, pressure sensors, deployment of RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tags, etc. Modern sensors and smart devices use many different ways to connect. Wireless networks like LoRAWAN, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth make it easy for them to stay connected. Connectivity management enables timely handling of failures and failures as well as minimizing disruption of an IoT system. Effective management also helps identify intrusions, replacing spy devices into a system of devices.
The user interface provides a physical and tangible part to which users can easily access the IoT ecosystem. On the other hand, the network of IoT devices relies heavily on user interfaces. The administration of the user interface helps to improve the quality of use as well as manage the existing problems of the IoT network.
There are various tools used for data collection purposes that can efficiently and real-time collect, process, process and store data; this can be done using the IoT cloud. The IoT cloud management helps to manage the data analysis value well, the data is not lost, changed or error.
An important attribute of the IoT ecosystem is to support real-time analytics to detect anomalies and prevent data loss or data fraud to prevent malicious attacks. The management of the data analysis process will ensure that the data is processed properly, sufficiently and in accordance with the selected technology, thereby generating more value.
In order for IoT devices and systems to connect correctly, it is necessary to define standards and protocols from the beginning to unify the overall interaction of the whole system. The management of standards and protocols ensures uniformity in terms of standardization so that a device or a part of the whole IoT device system becomes obsolete.
Database management is a basic thing for any system not only with IoT systems, centralized or distributed database management will be a mandatory requirement in terms of security. as well as coordinate processing of data exchange of IoT devices.
Managing the automation of a network of IoT devices is a security imperative. Similar to the management of ports and connectivity, automatic management helps users easily grasp the ability to run smoothly, effectively without interruption, insecurity and security of the whole device system. suffer from IoT.
Similarly, managing IoT interoperability plays the same role as automation, gateway, and connectivity management. IoT interoperability is a required advancement in light of the ever-growing and time-increasing demands of IoT technology. IoT-related technologies and devices are still in a process of rapid development and enhancement without common industry standards. Since IoT works with multiple devices and systems, it is important to ensure interoperability and manageability across the entire IoT ecosystem.
From these 9 factors, it can be seen that for IoT devices and ecosystems, there are many problems to manage. However, currently on the world market, there are only basic management interfaces for users. Some other platforms specialize in managing only one issue, one element. Another problem is that many platforms cannot guarantee absolute security due to the openness of the source code and the method of implementation. In the general development trend, it is necessary to build a common manageable platform for all these issues.
World Practice
Currently in the world, IoT platforms are quite popular with non-commercial or commercial private products. Government IoT platforms are not as popular as the continuous development of IoT devices will require a large amount of expenditure, there are no appropriate management development frameworks or concerns about barriers to development. IoT ecosystem development in general. The most prominent may be the Greek government IoT platform developed and published since 2015. Returning to the more popular part of the ecosystem, the market has 4 popular types of IoT platforms: Cloud Platform, IoT Connectivity Platform, IoT Device Platform (end to end), Analytics Platform (or Data Platform). Specifically, the following are the 3 best and most popular IoT platforms in 2022.
The first is the Google Cloud Platform (Google Cloud IoT). The platform provides a multi-layered security infrastructure. With the diversity of the ecosystem of applications and technologies, the platform has a large partner ecosystem and diverse utilities. The benefits of Google Cloud IoT are machine learning for any IoT need, real-time business insights for globally distributed devices, applicability of artificial intelligence, and more. Provides support for a wide range of embedded, location-smart operating systems. The platform is considered to be able to organize, manage and share documents very easily. It works with all operating systems. Overall, the platform offers good features and functions and is easy to use. However, in terms of superiority, usefulness and convenience, the price of the platform is not cheap, in addition to the free version with few experiential features, the paid version starts from 300 USD to 1,758 USD for the full version. Monthly.
The second is the OpenRemote platform. OpenRemote is a 100% open source IoT platform for creating a wide range of applications. They are applied in larger professional IoT applications such as: energy management, crowd management. The main features of the platform are the provision of IoT-based protocols such as HTTP, TCP, UDP, Websocket or MQTT, to connect your IoT devices, gateways or data services, or build an API supplier-specific missing; provide other protocols such as KNX or Modbus; provides a rule engine with a “flow editor”, WHEN-THEN and a Groovy user interface; providing dashboards for provisioning, automating, controlling, and monitoring user applications and Web user interface components for building project-specific applications; mobile apps for Android and iOS, including the option to use geolocation and push notifications; Edge Gateway solution to connect multiple instances to a centrally managed instance; the ability to create multiple domains combined with account management and identity services. Of course, with being an open source platform, the cost is also completely free. Although the platform is considered to be very impressive because it contains all the basic needs of users, is free and seems to be trusted by a large number of users, the platform also has some limitations as it is not rich in features. functionality as the cost is paid for the great services the platform provides.
The third is the Voracity platform. Voracity is a fast, affordable platform for discovering, integrating, migrating, administering, and analyzing data that can transform, report, and anonymize device data transfers via Kafka or MQTT . Voracity has a small “footprint data” manipulation tool for quick aggregation, plus a full Eclipse IDE for metadata, graphical data integration, and analysis. The platform features the connection and integration of sensors, logs and other data sources; filter, transform, clean, mask and report consolidated data (same I/O); runs on a variety of Linux, Unix and Windows platforms, from the Rasberry Pi to the az/Linux mainframe; move, replicate, subset, and use IoT data for storage, data lakes, purpose-fit data wrapper nodes to aggregate and anonymize IoT data and provide data feeds for IoT mining and machine learning nodes; App options, add-ons, and Universal Forwarder for quick preparation and Splunk live indexing for cloud analysis and action on IoT data. Costs range from about $100 to $99999 per hostname per year; depending on the ingredients and volume required. This is not a device management platform but an analytics platform. It is a highly flexible, high-speed data manipulation tool and platform to integrate, govern, and analyze IoT data.
The next rankings can be mentioned Particle platform, ThingWorx platform, IBM Watson IoT, Amazon AWS IoT Core, Microsoft Azure IoT Suite, Oracle IoT, Cisco IoT Cloud Connect.
Next, there are 10 popular open source IoT platforms such as Eclipse IoT, Kaa IoT, SiteWhere (open platform for Internet of Things), ThingSpeak (open IoT platform with MATLAB analytics), DeviceHive, Mainflux, … That speaks to the diversity of the IoT platform services market as well as the diversity of IoT platforms in the ecosystem.
Recommendations For Vietnam
In Decision No. 186/QD-BTTTT, Approval of the Digital Platform Development Program, briefly described the IoT device platform provided as a service allowing agencies, organizations, businesses and people to translate IoT device management service, establish connection of remote IoT devices, collect and manage data from IoT devices, process data on demand, connect, integrate and share data with other devices. applications outside the IoT network… effectively, without having to invest in specialized infrastructure to build and develop IoT applications. Overall, the program is aimed at private enterprises to build an overall IoT governance platform.
For the current IoT platform, open source code is much, partner development is also popular, so it is certain that the development of IoT platform in Vietnam has no difficulty in optimizing utilities, functions, processing capabilities. physical. Building an IoT platform in Vietnam needs to deal with some of the following obstacles:
- Data management: Almost all popular platforms now have databases located abroad, even cloud and centralized databases, which leads to the loss of a large amount of data that is considered gold. number in the 4.0 era. Building an IoT platform in Vietnam will aim to contain and protect Vietnamese people’s data storage, creating value for Vietnam.
- Privacy: Many IoT devices today are manufactured abroad, or used mainly according to international standards and protocols. This poses the problem that the provision of user personal data requires a Vietnamese IoT platform to manage according to the privacy protection mechanism for Vietnamese users.
- Security breach: The issue of network security is an issue that has been highly appreciated by Vietnam in recent years, for the openness due to the wide-area connection of many IoT devices when the security capability is at risk of being hacked. high work. This requires that the Vietnam IoT platform needs to enhance the security between device connection, exchange between devices, initial connection… All of that is built on the basis of network safety and security of Vietnam.
Conclusion
Through the introduction to the world practice with IoT platform and recommendations for Vietnam, it can be seen the need to develop a separate IoT platform in Vietnam. This is one of 35 platforms promoted by the Ministry of Information and Communications to create a platform owned by Vietnamese businesses that not only brings value to Vietnamese people, organizations and state agencies in Vietnam but also and towards the world.
Hopefully through this article, the IoT platform created by Vietnam will be able to handle the main obstacles and master IoT in Vietnam.
Good read.