Applications and Communication Technologies in IoT Sensor Networks

The advances of the Internet have undergone many changes over the years. This has led to an increment in the number of connected applications through emerging technologies to the Internet. The contribution of this chapter is two-fold; the first fold characterizes and presents applications of IoT sensor networks into three application domains, namely consumer IoT, commercial IoT, and Industrial IoT (IIoT). Consumer IoT includes applications such as smart homes using technologies such as virtual assistants such as voice assistants or smartphones to control home appliances such as doors, locks, and switches in the house. Commercial IoT includes smart cities with applications such as smart meters, smart farming, and not limited to smart transportation. In contrast, industrial IoT application is applied in industrial manufacturing for asset management in applications such as smart grids, communication factories, and industries to achieve efficiency and sustainable energy management practices. It has been forecasted that by the year 2020, 20.4 billion IoT devices will be deployed across the world. As the IoT adoption grows rapidly, there is an increasing demand for heterogeneous devices to connect to the Internet through low power communication technologies. The second fold of this chapter presents technologies in IoT sensor networks. These technologies are characterized by low power consumption, low bandwidth usage, low computation power, and seamless communication of connected devices. These technologies include NFC, RFID, LoRA, Zig-Bee, etc. However, choosing the appropriate technology for an IoT sensor network depends on various factors such as the nature of the application, communication range, data rate requirement, energy consumption, frequency band, and cost.