7. Communication

As the Internet of Things is growing very rapidly, there are a large number of heterogeneous smart devices connecting to the Internet. IoT devices are battery powered, with minimal compute and storage resources. Because of their constrained nature, there are various communication challenges involved, which are as follows:

  1. Addressing and identification: since millions of smart things will be connected to the Internet, they will have to be identified through a unique address, on the basis of which they communicate with each other. For this, we need a large addressing space, and a unique address for each smart object.
  2. Low power communication: communication of data between devices is a power consuming task, specially, wireless communication. Therefore, we need a solution that facilitates communication with low power consumption.
  3. Routing protocols with low memory requirement and efficient communication patterns.
  4. High speed and nonlossy communication.
  5. Mobility of smart things.

IoT devices typically connect to the Internet through the IP (Internet Protocol) stack. This stack is very complex and demands a large amount of power and memory from the connecting devices. The IoT devices can also connect locally through non-IP networks, which consume less power, and connect to the Internet via a smart gateway. Non-IP communication channels such as Bluetooth, RFID, and NFC are fairly popular but are limited in their range (up to a few meters). Therefore, their applications are limited to small personal area networks. Personal area networks (PAN) are being widely used in IoT applications such as wearables connected to smartphones. For increasing the range of such local networks, there was a need to modify the IP stack so as to facilitate low power communication using the IP stack. One of the solutions is 6LoWPAN, which incorporates IPv6 with low power personal area networks. The range of a PAN with 6LoWPAN is similar to local area networks, and the power consumption is much lower.

The leading communication technologies used in the IoT world are IEEE 802.15.4, low power WiFi, 6LoWPAN, RFID, NFC, Sigfox, LoraWAN, and other proprietary protocols for wireless networks.