The current pandemic situation has affected the Internet of Things (IoT) market. While some industries took a hit, opportunities have emerged for others. For instance, automation or monitoring solutions that help to mitigate physical interaction will see greater opportunities. However, figuring out how to efficiently connect all those IoT sensors and devices remains one big barrier. According to a study by ResearchAndMarkets.com, despite the fast-growing IoT adoption in Asia Pacific (APAC), which is expected to reach $424 billion in size by 2025, real-world IoT deployments are still being challenged by a complex and costly array of various network protocols and disparate management tools. Across multiple markets and verticals, including healthcare, intelligent buildings, smart cities and smart campuses, an increasing number of applications are accelerating IoT adoption. Each IoT system may require dedicated IoT gateways to support the network protocol used by its respective devices. Moreover, these systems often demand the installation of additional security and power infrastructure, resulting in multiple instances of siloed overlay networks.
As such, there is a pressing need to simplify overly-complex IoT deployments by consolidating multiple radio technologies - such as Wi-Fi, BLE, LoRaWAN, and Zigbee - into a single platform. This approach simplifies management and control within the network for IT and also operational technology (OT) while reducing networks’ attack surface and automating security oversight.
Important features to aid the deployment of IoT devices
Overall, network operators should adopt solutions or a flexible network approach that addresses common challenges within the IoT ecosystem, both from the IoT supplier’s side as well as the enterprise’s IT deployment side. The right solution should enable customers to capture any and all IoT traffic - and backhaul traffic data over a common Wi-Fi and wired network, leveraging existing LAN and WLAN infrastructure to shorten deployment duration and reduce the cost of supporting multiple IoT solutions.
It is important to look out for solution features that resolves other common concerns when deploying flexible, converged IoT platforms:
1. Enablement of IT departments to pre-define network routing and handling of IoT traffic within the access domain. This ensures IoT traffic is prioritized appropriately for the application, a feature that is critical for the processing of sensor data at the edge.
2. An embedded Long-Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) Server. This enables the seamless integration of IoT traffic originating from LoRa devices. With an embedded network server, customers will no longer be required to maintain a separate LoRa network server to support LoRa traffic.
3. Enhanced IoT Security to enable secure enterprise-grade on-boarding of devices, as well as certificate-based authentication supporting MQTT protocols over SSL and REST APIs for security stands, as well as virtual LAN isolation of IoT traffic.
Converged networks will unify connectivity
Having a purpose-built infrastructure that leverages next-gen connectivity for IoT deployment is more crucial now than ever, at a time when the world look towards remote working to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. Ongoing real-world IoT deployments are being hampered by unnecessary, haphazard and costly use of gateways, protocols and management suites that are not strategically aligned.
Delivering a converged access layer will form the foundation for universal connectivity requirements for all users, applications, devices, and locations, and this can be achieved by consolidating multiple radio technologies into a single platform - effectively addresses fragmentation at the edge by enabling unified management and the implementation of a comprehensive security framework.
