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
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