Thursday 29 November 2018
Challenges, Designs and Implementations of the IoMT
In continuation of our previous blog post titled Internet of mobile things: Things you need to know, we are going to build on that knowledge and expound on the various challenges facing the internet of mobile things(IoMT) including implementation and possible design systems to be used in its deployment.
The Internet of Things is a hot and
trending topic that has-rapidly found relevance in various sectors and by
extension its sub-niches like the internet of mobile things. It has been a
revolutionary concept and considering the several ways in which mobile devices
are being incorporated into the IoT , Its growth can only be left to
imagination.
And when considering mobility of
things, the difference between IoT and IoMT are major changes occurring in
terms of:
1.
Availability
of Energy considering parameters like access to the nearest charging spot,
energy consumption level of the device or app, source of energy to be used by
mobile devices among others.
2.
Privacy
and Security of Mobile Devices with focus being on what kind of security
infrastructure the mobile device encounters while in transit and protection of
user data from IoMT service providers.
3.
Context,
e.g., where the mobile device is located, in what hands it is now and what
other device(s) it is connected to.
4.
Access
to the Internet which means the mobile device’s connectivity has to be
determined, as well as its connection time to whichever wireless or wired
network, bandwidth level and the security level or protocol involved.
Hence, when considering IoMT, mobility
becomes a first-class object and one has to look at the IoMT separately from
IoT.
What
are the challenges with the IoMT? 😬
- User Privacy -- One threat to IoT application
development is data security and integrity, and with interconnection
between devices and device mobility, user data might just be vulnerable to
hackers. This is possible because the hacker now gets access to other
devices connected to that system. Hence, more effort should be spent
towards the development of high integrity security systems, making devices
adaptive to different contexts and environments and location privacy. Furthermore,
complexity might arise as more and more devices are connected and with the
influx of system-controlling sensors and apps, the amount of data moving
throughout the enterprise will see a tremendous uptick as well. With
increase in data volume, there’s a noticeable stress on the network as
well as an increased challenge to secure the data at rest and data in
transit.
- Mobile Data Collection –- Nowadays, mobile phones, vehicles and
other ‘things’ come equipped with advanced sensing and communication
capabilities. These sensors are capable of capturing a wide range of
information which include physical, personal, and social contextual
information that can be used in data analysis and data management.
However, managing and leveraging on these sensors efficiently remains a
challenge since each of these sensors employs a different technology with
distinct trade-offs in terms of energy consumption, connectivity, and
sensing capability.
More
importantly, the collected sensing traces are only useful if they are clean,
complete, and privacy-preserved. Data collection in the context of Internet of
Mobile Things (IoMT) thus become highly challenging since: (1) the wireless
communication technology employed by these sensors is unreliable and error
prone, (2) continuous sensing requires a persistent supply of energy and an
extensive amount of data storage, (3) development of sensing applications are
quite costly, (4)selecting the right set of sensors for each device and making
them understand people mobility and context requires highly skilled technicians
and (5) developing sensing applications is expensive.
- Mobile Data Analytics -- As sensing data are collected from mobile devices, they can be
transferred to a centralized server for storage and analysis. Different
from analysing data of static sensor networks, the analysis of data from
mobile devices poses a number of challenges that are centred around the
mobility of devices:
1.
Mobility characterization: How to characterize the mobility of
devices? this includes defining the right metrics (which is representation of
mobility) and analysing the collected traces to characterize the mobility by
those metrics. This is non-trivial because the collected data might be noisy
and incomplete, and sometimes, lack important context information, such as
location (e.g., because location sensor is turned off to save energy, or the
device is indoor). In addition, the characteristics should be able to capture
the realistic behaviours of people movements, which exhibit a high degree of
repetition.
2.
Exploiting mobility models: Which involves how to leverage the
mobility models of IoMT devices to improve the effectiveness of data analysis
tasks.
- Energy Management – In accommodating the vast amount of mobile
things and their varying types, energy management is a critical issue
because compared to conventional energy management strategies, energy
management for mobile things such as phones and electric vehicles has
several distinct features including energy source placement, energy
exchange and cross-device energy management and monitoring.
One critical challenge of energy
management in mobile things is allowing direct energy exchange between the
different devices of different users as is commonly seen in airports where one
charges their smartphone via a USB cable connected to their laptop. Both
devices belong to the same user and there is no accounting or billing issues
involved. However, with each user having access to multiple IoMT devices with
different battery storage, it is likely that one sells energy directly to
another in a device-to-device manner. Imagine the case where an electric
vehicle runs out of battery and there is no charging station nearby. With
proper support of accounting and billing protocols, the vehicle should be able
to buy electricity directly from another electric vehicle by connecting their
batteries via a charging cable.
Well, well, it’s been quite a ride down
here and in a follow-up post to this, we'll cover up on the design systems and
implementation models of the Internet of Mobile Things. Meanwhile, drop your comments
down below and do ensure you click the link to our social media handles.
And if you enjoyed this post, we’d be
very grateful if you’d help it spread by emailing it to a friend, or sharing it
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Tuesday 13 November 2018
Trillionaire Apple: How tech companies have upset the global market
A decade ago, when crude oil was over 100 dollars per barrel, oil companies dominated every list of the world’s top companies. Ever heard of PetroChina? Well, the China based oil giant used to be the world’s largest company with a market value of $728 billion and becoming the first company worldwide to cross the 1 trillion-dollar mark in market value.
Fortunately, tables have turned in favour of another sector,
Technology! Also a decade ago, just a single tech company,
Microsoft, was listed among the ten biggest companies in the world and years after
years after, half of the top ten are tech giants. This doesn’t imply stagnancy
or a decline in other sectors, but establishes the fact that tech firms are
growing faster.
Describing
the tech industry’s history, the 90’s was the era of the Personal Computer;
then comes the internet and related services, rapidly followed by mobile
technology; and we are in the age of artificial intelligence. Unsurprisingly enough, the technology sector is the
key catalyst for change in the world, with technology companies not only
dominating our daily lives which is obvious in the number of times you've checked your phone today but
also the ranking of the world’s biggest companies.
The world is changing at an increasingly remarkable pace and nothing
describes this better than observing globally, rankings of the largest companies. Businesses today have learnt to move
fast in a bid for survival despite always wanting to be ahead of competitors
but unfortunately for others and luckily for tech companies, they are much
quicker than those in other industries in gaining market share, controlling
costs, and making decisions due to their insistence on empowering their staff
to be continuously creative and innovative.
Undoubtedly, no recent graduate longs to work anywhere else
anymore asides the T-shirt, sneaker wearing, fast moving internet giants like Amazon,
SoftIngines, Google and Facebook. These technology giants are currently
dominating the world and labour market by heavily investing in the development of
new products and services leading to an explosion in innovation and faster
growth.
One
common trend in the tech market is ‘prominence’, as each individual company
tries to forge their own path unlike in the past where transnationals competed
alongside one another at the top of the global market. Whereas, in today’s
business world there is no second place which means coming second is not an
option. And these large technology companies
which benefit from globalisation, are always penetrating new markets to first
lay their dominance.
In the tech world, there’s no space for competition as any
promising small company that could compete is quickly acquired by its larger
rival. For example, Facebook acquired upcoming threats WhatsApp and Instagram,
while Google has made more than 120 acquisitions in the last 10 years.
What’s
more, the tech market has billions of consumers eagerly awaiting the next big
thing from these companies which means they only need to worry about user
satisfaction and not customer acquisition. All the tech world requires is
creativity and you don’t need to wait a century to build a top five company,
which was what it took a decade ago. You can do it in your lifetime.
On
average, these top five companies collectively are just 33 years old with them
all being established and managed by entrepreneurs, even if they are large
public companies and, in most cases, a considerable portion of their voting
shares are held by their founders.
Bearing
all these in mind, it’s therefore not surprising that Apple has become the
first American company and the first tech company and also the first company
after PetroChina to hit the 1 trillion-dollar margin. This is positive news for
all of us in the tech industry and we hope to better improve the world as we
try to better technology.
Watch
out for our next post where we give you insight on how to invest in tech
companies, which companies to invest in and which tech companies to follow so
you don’t miss out on this moving train.
Bye!
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