Free Short Course: The Internet of Things - Module 1

good evening everybody it's seven o'clock here in um sunny and chilly Melbourne and uh I'd like to welcome you all along to our free short course on the Internet of Things um presented by it Masters in conjunction or as a partner of Charleston universities while everybody's filing in uh pretend you've got elevator music going on I'm going to leave it for about another three to five minutes while we're the numbers all pick up and then we'll start and kick off in Earnest so um like to speak to you soon in the meantime feel free to chat say g'day in the chat tell us where you're all coming from what you're doing be interested to see if you've got any Internet of Things projects on the go and uh yeah we're keen to say hello so speak to you in about five minutes properly thanks foreign thanks for being patient and just waiting until we got uh everybody coming into the room as it were and again I'd like to formally welcome you to tonight's free short course week one of an introduction to The Internet of Things is that's what this week is called my name is Shane Murphy and I'm from it Masters and I'll be your host and co-presenter where we've got a slightly different format this week than we normally do um now uh let's do the bit of a housekeeping first up feel free to chat in the uh in the chat room of course tell us where you're from I can see there's been people from all over the world already from Malawi from Cameroon from Burma from Kenya uh lots of people from Melbourne and Australia in general as well as we'd normally expect a few from Malaysia so it's it's great to see and I hope you're doing well and a safe and in good place at the moment wherever you're from Iraq and the Solomons all over the place got specific questions that you'd like us to answer put those in the Q a section our amazing moderator Lil will serve them up to us at the appropriate times and we'll pause a couple of points during the evening as well to answer questions as well at the end we should have a space often we don't get to answer all the questions because we can get hundreds or you know dozens and dozens and time runs out very quickly and so you can visit learn.itmasters.edu.edu which is where our short courses are hosted and in the forums there there'll be chat rooms where people can actually discuss various questions that they want to ask of each other and Jeff and I will no doubt pop our heads in from time to time as well before we start I'm webcasting as it were from Melbourne and I'd like to acknowledge that we are webcasting from boy roaring country the lands of the Warren Jerry people and I wish to acknowledge them as the traditional owners of this land I'd also like to pay my respects to their Elders past and present and Aboriginal Elders of other communities who may be present today with us virtually and now I'd like to introduce our team for the evening for the next four weeks in fact on my virtual left and I'll see if I can switch him on is Jeff Dr Jeffrey Jenkins uh Jeff is a senior engineer at a company called core Wireless here in Melbourne and in fact all over the world they're an american-based company who provide connectivity services for iot application and device providers he's been there since 2007 roughly now that's a long time isn't it Jeff and prior to that worked for Telstra which is a local carrier for those of you from overseas in similar Fields he will give us some of the technical rigor that we need throughout the series and we'll take the lead in presenting weeks three and four which will be more focused on the nuts and bolts how everything works my name's Shane Murphy as I said before and I too have a long history in the internet of things and its predecessors working first in two-way radio comms in the 90s and then in cellular applications in the 2000s and I moved to it Master a little while ago but my background is more in the business and project side of iot and so I take the lead in presenting weeks one and two where we're going to focus as much as we can on the why of iot and the how not the not the white and uh not the watt hour if you like and just going to keep me on track with that uh and Lil as I mentioned before our monitor is here to keep us herded and in line because it's very easy to go overboard Jeff and I have worked together in the past so we have quite a lot of War stories that we can contribute to and I hope you'll find those interesting hi Jeff by the way welcome aboard thank you very much Shane it's great to be here especially with this International crowd from just everywhere it's fantastic isn't it um and a few other languages in English cropping up there which it's good to see um and I also would like to pay my respects to the war injury people um and I'm I'm glad that we do that excellent now in terms of plan we're going to generally examine what the Internet of Things is in week one we'll talk a little bit more about that where it came from where it's usually made up and I'm going to put this in here but Lil will be reminding everybody multiple times next week the course is going to start one hour earlier if you're viewing from Outsider if you're not in Victoria in Australia New South Wales Queen um Tasmania or South Australia all the other places in the world will be one hour different in time because we move into daylight savings we normally try not to to put our um courses in the middle of daylight savings but we got caught this time and so just remember next week if you're viewing it at your local time is 10 o'clock it'll be nine o'clock next week it's UTC plus nine o'clock next week this week it's UTC plus twin we will remind you again at the end um so yeah please put that in your diaries for next week so that's week one week two will be more about projects discuss the business of iot if you like why it makes sense how it makes sense and how to create successful projects to a certain extent and in both weeks one and two there'll be lots of examples of projects that have gone well and badly yes and not Queensland unfortunately for the uh for the daylight saving week three and four will be primarily led by Jeff and I will be just hosting and he'll focus on all of the details of things you know how the pieces fit together why particular Technologies make sense and how to assess them with the focus in week four on things like big data and results and applications side of things whereas week three will be more about the actual Communications and the devices so with no further Ado let's launch into some actual content uh this is what we're going to cover this week and it looks like that unfortunately just talk about what is the internet thing this is a very very introductory week and here are our pictures by the way and you can choose which one you want I'm the bottom picture of course um what drives iot take up as I said iot devices comms big data and applications that's our things this week history what happens you know where it came from Because The Internet of Things as a concept has only been around well it's actually been coined about 25 years ago but it's still only been used wisely for the last 10 or 15 years the major elements of system how they all come together we'll talk a little bit about those some examples of iot apps and why people use iot so it's going to be reasonably high level and it's going to have a lot of a lot of generic information this week around what's going on and what has happened in the past so let's start with the definition it's always good to read an actual like Wikipedia style definition The Internet of Things IRT describes devices with sensors processing ability software and other technologies that connect and exchange data with other devices and systems over the Internet or and or other Communications Networks now that is very broad but it actually does cover all the aspects of it and you'll see more when we get into some um you'll see more when we get into some actual diagrams of systems the term was actually coined by a Procter and Gamble engineer um our computer scientist Kevin Ashton he was looking at putting some of the early RFID tags on products so that he could track them through a supply chain he said ah this is like the internet but it's things and somehow that name has stuck and we'll talk about the names that came before it the whole concept of it though is that no humans are involved in the day-to-day operation of the iot network oven to them to receive outputs and Jeff will talk I'll pass it over to Jeff talk about that in just a sec but you'll you'll also hear other terms bandied around there's uh The Internet of Things got quite a Guernsey recently uh I'm not sure that I can really differentiate that from The Internet of Things particularly I think somebody had a substantive interest in in differentiating that there's the iiot the industrial internet of things which sort of focuses on a subset of the internet of things that will cover off a little bit later on which is more about monitoring machines and devices in that sort of original applications of where iot came from and again that's you know it's deployed by people that have an idea that they want to um that they want to you know focus on so they come up with another name but Jeff let's um yeah tell me about why machine why humans aren't involved we're getting people asking you know hang on a minute I think iot involves smart watches um actually that I'm looking back at that definition Shane I read it a couple of times and uh it touches something and maybe misses something a little bit um obviously Internet of Things involves some thing uh in this case a usually a sensor something that can can convert an observation a temperature or the like or a location uh into a network message and then pass it over share it with um with something else in the system um uh and so that says their exchange data with other devices and systems um but the focus becomes uh very much on exchanging data with uh systems um and so we get a sort of Stack a hierarchy devices sensors at the bottom some Communications something in the cloud and then some somebody watching it and that's the stack that we'll talk about later one of the interesting things about no humans being involved and we've um this is true and false um uh is that when we try and work out what the value of Internet of Things is what the value of these projects might be um sometimes because people are not involved the value is not is not recognized and I think this is this is um largely true in the in the history of the internet of things so we often at work we are we are often connecting uh important devices Gathering very important information but the customer says well there's no people involved it's just a few things and we're not going to pay much for the communication so getting away from that I think is one of the purposes of this course just recognize the value of Internet of Things designs um and to work out how to exploit that value how to build projects out of it yes and and I think you'll hear what you might even call a jaded or cynical view for me at times because uh I have heard more uh pictures and propositions for Internet of Things applications than most of us have had hot dinners over the years it was part of my job to listen to people's business cases and to be honest the overwhelming bulk of them were absolute rubbish um and that is why so few things actually got up in the early days so we'll we'll talk a lot more about that sort of stuff in week two but referring back to be honest intervening at this point but a lot of those suggestions came from me yeah well I wouldn't say that um but yes going back to what you're talking about in terms of a diagram this is a diagram that I've come up with because I've tried to I've tried to simplify it reasonably because I think every time we start talking about layers and this and that it makes things slightly more complicated to my way of my small brain so basically what we have here at the left hand side we're going from left to right across this set of diagrams and what happens is events happen measurable stuff happens you know an ambulance turns on that siren starts moving somebody starts up a machine they pour some concrete it rains uh you know a shark or an orca moves around the fire um you know the fire hydrant goes off there's data transit or not data there's electricity transmitted over electricity lines uh you know if a uh a gaming machine plays they're big uses of iot a photocopier tracks the number of photocopies it's got so all of those things their events in the real world and then the iot system sort of starts at this point down here I should have drawn a line in probably and what happens is there are measurement sensors of some sort or interface devices that interface with these things we call them Edge devices but essentially they measure what happens in some way or another that measurement can be a flick of a switch it can be in and on and off it can be a temperature it can be all sorts of different things but essentially that ARA device that measures something that happens in the real world and then it goes into essentially the virtual world it's transmitted across clouds and we've all seen lots of cloud pictures but the cloud can consist of cellular networks two-way radio networks satellite networks fixed line networks wide area lands of various different types lorawan seek Fox all the old ones and personal area networks like Bluetooth zigbee or all of those sorts of things then from there it pops out the other end into a database and server and you know a big Warehouse effectively of data is what I would call it and that's where Big Data if you like sort of raises its head as a concept because these data warehouses keep enormous amounts of data and as we go on we'll talk a little bit more about that too and all sorts of different implications of that data and then from there we get applications that go across that and deliver an output and those outputs in my head are still remarkably simple and they're they're usually fall into three categories the first category is some sort of an alarm goes off oops something's gone wrong you need to know about this that requires action from you or you get a report these are the things that happened in this period of time some of them are more important than others these are the important ones do something about them or we get a transactional event occurring and they're essentially all of this that boils down to one of these three things and I'd be really interested as we go through the evening if people have examples of things that you think contravene this sort of way of looking at it because it is it is a fairly typical way and I think to you know to sort of emphasize that let's look at some other people's concepts of it um you know if we go back to the basics we've got Edge devices as they're called um usually the communications Network a database server and in an application that overlays that which produces an output now down here and I think you can read that reasonably well over the um over the slide that's something from a company called interview bit and they have a four stage iot architecture and they call it layers they have a sensing layer a network layer so the sensing layer is The Edge devices a network layer which is your Communications a data processing layer which is your database servers and then an application labor I call them smart apps or you know process information data transmission data Gathering what nobody everybody forgets to put is that out of the application layer spits outputs results things that matter otherwise why are we doing it for God's sake you know that is they are the important things every part of it's important but this is where the money is made this is where the reason happens and I hope you can see my mouse spinning around it madly because that is what drives the application essentially and this over here is what IBM do when they've got something that they want to tell you about and that is an IBM um version of an Internet of Things map and I thought that Jeff might have a few things to say about that because it's quite a complex Beast I did want to Shane but just before I I do over on the left side what you just talked about um uh is is changing dramatically uh in its architecture and design uh and in what it's capable of um under our feet as we speak um so um the smart application layer has become much smarter in the last short while uh and that's one of the things that we're going to have to address in this course is um uh is artificial intelligence or machine learning and iot uh is that just going to be not require the humans anymore at all and just operate on its own on its own and what we've discovered as part of that process is that that there's much more opportunity to do good things with the data than we ever realized not just aggregating it and passing it on but processing it and understanding it um so actually that diagram on the left is rather like the diagram on the right sort of put on its side um and it's a little hard to see because the writing's small but what you've got uh in those vertical uh um Liars vertical Towers um actually vertical silos they almost start um is uh four networks so you've got over on the left the proximity Network so that's your data Gathering that's that lowest level um the devices themselves then you've got a public network and that uh is um the the comms to communicate the data across to the third uh Silo which is the uh Cloud Network it's the most complex one as you can see at least in IBM's understanding of it um there are lots and lots of components there which are performing Special Operations on the data before it is passed over to the Enterprise Network on the right so um we might think of all of that as one big Network they've split it into four networks with all their individual complexity um and so we're going to have to visit that again but I draw one uh um point to your attention before we move on and that is look at that across the bottom um so that's the security element and you see it's oriented in a completely different direction each of these vertical blocks operates independently but the security element uh traverses the whole lot of them uh and that's key to the design we'll talk a lot about security as we go along uh and that particular way of thinking about and representing uh the importance of security as that which binds everything together um is something we'll talk about again absolutely I thought we might also pause here for a couple of questions before we move on because we've got a few here um Jeff I thought you might know the answer this one how are iot outputs related to Big Data and maybe that's something you're going to in more depth in future weeks yeah well look at that I think in week uh in week four um but when you think about an iot project uh it is a way of taking uh accepting data whenever it comes so you don't have a human there uh watching uh all the time you don't want to miss any of the outputs so you're going to have to put them somewhere you're gonna have to store them um uh but as as the amount of data increases and more more especially as the complexity increases so we're getting data from five or six or seven or eight different types of uh um sensors perhaps and then we want to be able to see how that data combines into a single understanding of a situation and abstraction so we might for example we might um be collecting uh um some traffic management dialogue um and what we would like to do then is we'd like to also collect weather data because weather and traffic are closely related bring those together into a single um system of Big Data uh and and operate on it um uh with some machine learning and artificial intelligence to to draw the conclusions that we can then pass over so so the data's bigger because there's so much more of it but also because it's more complex uh and then uh the way we analyze that data the way we dredge down into it um ads uh complication and add sophistication to the way our iot system works exactly uh the other question somebody's asked here does Bluetooth also count as a network for iot it does indeed it is one of the pans the the personal area networks and I think I might have passed it by when I mentioned the pans by the way for those of you interested Jeff's background is ancient Greek and he's in fact a doctor of ancient languages and uh hence that is a a bit it's a bit of a Papyrus Jeff that you've been Translating that you've got in the wall behind you yes that one that one is a third Century text from Egypt which I didn't actually excavate but I was sitting in the Dig house when it was found uh and they came back from the morning's excavation all very excited and they said look what we found they had no idea what it was of course but um but because they were archaeologists but it it turns out to be a very important and interesting text and I like to have it as a reminder of those days in fact I think we have a photo with anybody who's logged into the yeah learn the lightingmasters.edu.edu from that dig of uh you and some other standing on a mountain or a sand dune anyway back to the questions then we'll move on one more question what is an example of transactional output we will actually give you a few examples later on but things like parking meters fpos ATMs are all examples of um of transactional outputs but we'll talk more about those as we go along so moving along we're now into how did iot come about it's been called all sorts of things over the years one source that I read a little while ago had it beginning in the mid-1800s with the introduction of the telegraph enabling some autonomous messages to be sent over those wires you know a switch went on they were getting a bit of information back that's probably during a very long bow I think if we talk about you know the 60s 70s 80s as being the real start of it here in most countries that's when things like Radio Networks became more affordable and governed and you've got more widespread Electronics out there that could do things and then what happened was in the beginning they were using fixed line phone networks so Telstra for example here in Australia and I'm sure other carriers in other countries did the same they had piles and piles of private fixed telephone cables many of them were only used directly for to what we call Telemetry systems in those days and others to operate Radio Networks that sent data Telemetry and Scatter applications so the the phone networks would be hooked up so you'd have something like that big Bank of switches over there and they would all be wired to particular machines and the machines would send information I'm getting over hot I've got you know a gauge would say I've got to a hot point and it would flip a flip an analog switch and that would set off an alarm on this huge network of Bank of things what then happened over a period of time is that scada became an acronym um was called supervisory control and dafa acquisition which is a terrible acronym but scada has been around for a long while now it's a computer-based system for gathering and analyzing real-time data to Monitor and control equipment that deals with critical and time sensitive materials or events they sort of took off when more so in the 70s and 80s as plcs and micro processors became available and were connected to fixed line networks initially and then to Radio Networks to monitor things like they start off in places like large factories and oil refineries we had very high value pieces of Machinery there and with lots of consequences if things went wrong that's the real that's the real um gist of it you know if something goes wrong in an oil phone and it blows up you have major problems and so you want to know about that stuff in advance so you went from those sorts of banks that you've got on the left to more uh displays as Windows came on board and you could actually put things in color and have some sort of Graphics where you've got information in red yellow green traffic light systems came up where still though with all of these you have very skilled Engineers running the networks and they're the only people that can nearly make head or tail of what's going on with them it's not very user friendly it's not you know it's not simple it's very techy at the same time people like um water utilities and the like would start would start um also putting uh data acquisition devices into things like flow meters for their and level controls for flooding or to make sure that the dams weren't bursting all that sort of stuff that's essentially what happens then as the 80s more on you get more of them on Specialized two-way radio networks as well as cables and you've got standards you know originally they ran on those huge monster computers and then eventually moved to PC based graphic display systems in the in the late 80s basically and more more so even into the 90s they also connected a lot of devices up to wide area paging networks for alarms uh it was the first one of the first demonstrations actually those paging networks of a wide Area Public Access Network being used for Internet of Things type applications but in those days it was called Telemetry or scada and then we moved you know as we moved into the 90s the name changed a little bit still called Telemetry also called telematics which was a branch of telemetry seemed to take it over for a while but increasingly it became wireless-based radio base you know you had but you still had these problems because it was it was usually being sent over two-way radio systems which would be able to send data at a speed of 1200 bits per second which is really slow which meant you could still only send very small bits of data and it was expensive to do because each radio device might cost you one to two to five thousand dollars per device to actually buy and install it and set it up with the sensors and then 30 or 40 or dollars more a month to actually use that device for very small amounts of data and they were sharing radio channels you've got contention between the way that it worked um you know because of two radios transmitted at the same time it just couldn't handle that and would lose the data to add low data speeds contention fixed cost per month uh data dispatch started to happen over this period of time as well we got people like taxi systems you would see if you think remember back that far the first little black boxes that sat on top of taxis and and they sent out where to go for the taxis and some Courier Systems started to appear in this as well usually only at the top end of town because the devices and the cost per unit to use it every month were very expensive and they couldn't be justified you'd be spending hundreds of thousands of dollars setting up systems I do remember for example in all the late 90s 98 99 uh a system was set up here in Melbourne for another transport companies that had a just-in-time delivery service for tall for a Ford Motor Company and I think for 25 devices and the whole system they were spending about two or three hundred thousand dollars and about two thousand dollars a month and and to be honest the Transport company told us that they didn't actually use it they just had to tell told Ford that that's what they were using because Ford wanted to be seen to be doing things right so you've got this sort of tension between commercial organizations that sort of want to do stuff but only if it's really cheap and a growing desire from customers demanding it and in the middle of that you've also got government bodies that are starting to regulate as well and that's why you got much more environmental bonding environmental monitoring by government bodies or non-government organizations like utilities and the like then oops we'll just go back up there go on I'm trying to um the the skater Origins are really interesting aren't they because um these these original systems were quite complex um and and quite capable and what you say is is true the only limit on on the number of devices and the amount of data you could collect uh was um what had nothing to do with the machines it was it was the actual cost of the of the devices um uh and so that idea that someone would be observing uh something in a factory and then would ring up the boss and say something's gone wrong with the number six uh that was so um so slow and uh really in many ways unreliable all of that could be replaced on a grand scale with with one PC in the factory talking to multiple machines um but it took some some clever engineering to achieve it but it started as a very complex process yeah so lots of companies that made their money out of selling small radio devices for about two thousand dollars each that had some some inputs on them and they're usually analog inputs at the time but we saw growing digitization throughout the 90s as well and of course then Along Came the first proper cellular networks as in they were they were digital cellular networks the analog networks of the um of the early 90s weren't much used for Telemetry and iot there were probably applications out there but we didn't see a lot of them but first first what happened with GSM is that we got what they call GSM dial-ups that was just like an old modem dialing up over the phone into the internet and worked in the same way but at an even slower speed in theory GSM had a speed of I don't know 32 bits per second but it was more like half that as a realistic thing and the the biggest application of it that we saw and the only time it was really deployed properly here in Australia for example was in electricity meter reading and we'll talk a little bit more about that case study uh later on in the day but essentially in Australia they're in excess of 50 000 dial-up meter readers in operation by about 2000 2002 they what they actually did was a big dialer would actually dial every single meter every night and download the data from that business's usage during the day and as I said fifty thousand dollar meter readers so it had to have a business case it had to make sense because it was happening and its government bodies are driving that sort of take up by them so you sort of get to the end of the 90s and everything's on a bit of an edge of a uh you know things seem to be happening but they're not quite happening I I do remember starting uh in the in this field in Cellular in the early 2000s and every app that we conceived of back then has slowly come to pass now but it has taken nearly forever to get there and much longer than what everybody thought we always just talk about the J curve you know it's all just going to go suddenly crazy but Jacobs never quite happened it's more of a more of a slant more of a slash but it has had consistent very strong long-term growth right across so you're talking about compound growth rates of 15 to 25 percent over an extended period of time so it has continued to do all sorts of things and it's it's in the early to mid 2000s that things really start to take off because what you get then is the introduction of SMS so SMS was always there with with GSM networks but realistically SMS was only suited to certain applications because it's very small data packet size it's also send store send again so that you couldn't always depend upon the timing of it being accurate and we can talk a little bit more about that if you want it's a store and forward technology rather than a a straight through technology and as this and the other real limiting factor with SMS was in the early days SMS only worked over one network at a time so until the networks decided to get interconnected which happened in Australia in this country in 2000 and other countries around about the same time maybe in Europe a little bit earlier certainly in America much later and once the once the networks became interconnected the volume of sms's went from that much to that much overnight almost immediately um and so that that did help because it affected in the ubiquity of of the um the platform but it was still very expensive because sms's in those days were costing 20 cents each so it was costing you 20 cents every time you want to find out where your vehicle was for example is that a business viable proposition who knows sometimes it was often it wasn't GPS was the factor just sorry GPRS was the big factor that actually really fired the the explosion alone because what would happen is you then have IP based platforms that come into it data is sent in a much more sensible way with no real limit on how much you can send over a period of time even if the throughput's not very fast the throughput on that was up to 64k but it was more like about 30 to 40 on average and the cost slowly came down as well and we'll talk a little bit more of those costs but if you look at it in terms of cost comparison at one point we were comparing the cost of an SMS for the cost of GPRS and it was essentially something like I think it was either a hundred or a thousand times more expensive on a per basis to send something Via SMS than it was via GPRS if you could just be charged for each individual buy and and that's what that's why SMS applications only work in certain areas usually they work in applications where you want to find out about something and it's really important but it's not completely Mission critical although in the early days a lot of the early tracking applications came from it from South Africa where security was Paramount um and the basic construction of the the network and the way that GPRS works is pretty much remained the same ever since and it's the idea around GPRS is that effectively you're running what is analogous to a virtual private Network across the radio network with data so everybody's net everybody's data from GPRS goes down a particular pipe if you like a virtual pipe where it's protected from other people's data and it can only come out the other end in a particular way and they do that by what they call access point names in GSM it was done slightly differently in other networks but essentially access point names are analogous to vpns and you would in the original days in the 2000s you would pay a lot of money to to connect a cable into the headquarters of the phone network and all of the data would come that cable back and down that cable back to your servers or your office or wherever you wanted it to end up uh now of course that has changed over time and vpns from your premises virtual connections from your premises into the networks and now the rule and then the other thing that really changed and from a cellular point of view that opened things up in that period was roaming global roaming and to where the Americans shot themselves in the foot with the way their networks worked and we'll talk a little bit more about that as well because once once you're able to take the same device with the same SIM card most places in the world and have it work it changes the whole basis of what you can do it means you can manufacture devices that will be used anywhere in the world so you don't have to manufacture a specific one from Australia and a specific one for Malaysia and a specific one for Nigeria because we're all using different devices and networks and that is they are huge factors in the ubiquity of the systems but Jeff you can tell me about what happens once we get past GPRS because there's been a lot going on since GSM finished yes there has and in actual fact we we're about to be out of date with our reference to 3G 4G and 5G because as most people will or most people from Australia will know on the call we're closing down our 3G Networks uh as of uh middle of next year uh and destroyed quite quite a bit of close down has already happened because of re-farming of networks so I'm sorry Shane I was gonna say we already went through that when GPRS and GSM closed down and it was interesting because if you look at the time scales GSM lasted what 20 something years out in the field in use 3GS lasted what actually it's probably nearly 20 years now as well I suspect that 4G and 5G won't last anywhere near as long yes yeah right and uh the other big um and important difference of course is is coverage because um these networks are bigger and so the particularly if we're talking 5G then uh we're we're covering a lot more territory where there aren't many people but where there might be very important iot applications I was going to say Shane about SMS and and GPRS that that that that very consideration that you've outlined there um already that still exists to this day with say iridium so iridium we we use iridium short burst data quite a lot it's just like an SMS really um and in actual fact it's it's charged for by the byte because these networks are so expensive to put up there that uh and they've got to recoup their their costs in various ways uh charge for by the bite and a short post data costs roughly one U.S Cent per byte

um round figures but that's that's dramatic when you think about uh and we've had our that Shane and I have had it our um our experience of this where um we had a we had a customer doing iridium short burst data and they had a complex device it was a hybrid device of GPRS and short best data and they got all the channels a bit confused and they started to send their GPRS over the short burst data and uh that's if we hadn't if we hadn't noticed and it took us a few days to notice um then everyone would have been bankrupt at the end of that um so I wanted to just mention that uh we might say something about satellites or I'll go back to you for that Shane but uh to introduce it at least but um what's what's happening much more is that uh these these cellular networks uh didn't really make much of a distinction between once they did data then they didn't make much of a distinction between the types of data that they did um uh a large large data might be volte so voice voice call um by data uh it might be uh it it might be uh something like uh website delivery or or it might be uh um exchange of um iot information now that's starting to change and with 4G and more particularly with 5G uh uh iot style data connections which are subsets of the uh of of the whole data capability of the network um are coming into play and this is particularly so that power management can be applied and we'll talk about that in week three um but for um for other reasons too sometimes in including security uh and separation of channels so all sorts of complexity is coming in terms of iot on 4G and on 5G um uh and and nbiot is a separate um is something separate um oh I wanted to mention one other thing quickly and that is bi-directionality um we've mostly been talking about collecting data from devices it comes into the server and then somebody looks at it uh but um we we should also be talking uh consistently about um uh information control information going out from uh the net the uh Network home out over the network to the devices that might be saying to the device don't report so often you're costing us a fortune uh or today is a hot day we want more more frequent reports those sorts of controls uh so that's the bi-directionality which is critical um and Shane will remember how much hassle there is in getting bi-directionality in SMS systems um because the channels are completely independent will become becomes critical in some applications because they were um without bi-directionality you have what's called a truck roll if you want to fix anything and that is very expensive when you get into truck rolls and that'll be I'm sorry Shane one more thing just quick is um that'll be when we talk about engineering aspects later designing these things in at the beginning knowing what the capabilities are and making sure that we exploit those capabilities for best functionality that's an important engineering function it's uh the original design of the project and it's the key thing you've got to focus on excellent yeah I think I think you could say the summary of this period is that three or four things happened at the same time because you have also as as we said um you know dedicated satellite networks come out which gave you a lot wider area coverage anywhere on the globe pretty much was covered as long as it was outside and in view of the sky um but what generally um and it is a feature of the satellite Network so nearly all of them went through what they call an America a chapter 10 or chapter 11 bankruptcy or um insolvency procedure because they spent so much money getting them up in the sky and took so long to get uptake that the only way they could actually make a money in accounting terms was to put them through insolvency and then come out the other end with all the debt having been wiped and then they could make an ongoing business out of it but they were never going to recover their Capital costs and to be fair in the early days cellular was not dissimilar for quite a long time but it took a long while to get the um to get the cost factors up but what generally happened though is you've got converging things during this period which is you've got wider and wider coverage you've got more and more devices that are built the same way and costs come down both of the devices and of the the data that you're sending so that's really important and that leads us on to the next thing which is this a whole pile of other technology that enabled the iot revolution it didn't just happen because a couple of people made a few things over a period of time and it didn't happen because um you know some organization like Erickson or Nokia who built most of the core cellular networks for example decided that they were going to do in the internet of things and therefore they had to make things happen you you had a a convergence of all of these things happening in the same sorts of time periods and they enabled they became enablers for it obviously the first one is Internet Protocol without that sort of addressing an ability to send and transmit data in those ways using that those systems nothing was going to happen obviously without the internet without IP the internet doesn't happen but you know that is it is worth reminding ourselves that these things happen at the same time GPS Global position systems we take that so much for granted now but in the 90s GPS had what they called the wobble Factor it was built for the U.S military the U.S military deliberately D um or fuzzied up the results that you would get from the devices in order that the Iraqis couldn't fire back at them basically that was the because it was developed around about the time when it was tested during the Gulf War in the early 1990s and so therefore the American Military prevented accuracy and data what happened then over a period of time was everybody found ways to backwards engineer the algorithm that the Americans used to make the wobble Factor happen because it would put your results out by 100 to 200 meters often and people found ways of making them more and more accurate even allowing for that wobble factor and so the military eventually said oh well yeah we've shot that bolt now we might as well just accept it and they turned that that um that misinformation Factor off at some point I forget when it was I think it was in the early 2000s but you know GPS was a huge development because it underlies so many other things that we do because you do some you have a measurable event and you assign a location to it you know you and in in line with that is digital mapping in the early 2000s you had to pay forty thousand dollars in Australia for an australia-wide mapping license and even then it was a hugely it was a hugely variable quality the digital Maps worked really well in some areas and in other areas they were non-existent and you got a patchwork of maps from different suppliers now digital mapping you know Google it's all there for pretty much free if you make commercial use of it you pay a license fee but it is all consistent it's regularly updated they have cars driving around adding you know photographs to it so it's that is a fantastic those two things together are amazing things and you talk about Big Data there's been questions about Big Data all night those are part of the Big Data Revolution being able to have location data attached to any event that happens the other things that happened was that you got large-scale database structures and SQL is the one that tended to be the winner out of all of those because there were free versions freeware versions there were paid versions there were but essentially SQL was SQL or SQL it all had different things and and people didn't like using other different types of SQL but it it tended to be the sort of system that people settled on for making an Internet of Things application because you could scale it up to quite a big size and at the same time it wasn't horrendously expensive um I know that you know a lot of the uh the bigger ones that the uh utility cues will use much larger and more expensive things like Oracle and other proprietary databases but SQL by and large has been widely used and we're still using it today miniaturization is really important for a whole pile of reasons it brings down size it brings down cost it brings down power usage power usage is something we just can't emphasize enough because when you have a device that's out in the field by itself somewhere if it uses too much power the battery goes flat or it has to be plugged into a you know a power outlet which means a remote thing is not working power is power is power battery battery technology with panoa or two of the other major things that drive it during that period of time then you had all these other little operating systems um uh what I call winds well Windows CE Windows Compact environment or something like that and other OS systems like the Palm Pilot things for small devices both proprietary and open made a big difference because it meant that you didn't have to have as big a computer chip on the devices in order for them to work and you could put some intelligent applications into them and then at the same time you've got continuing increasing chip capacity and decreasing power use at the same time so though all of those things Factor together because they're happening roughly at the same time and every few months there's a bit of a leap it's a bit like Moore's Law you get you know but well obviously the chip capacity is more law thank you compact Edition I used to call it wins because the devices were actually so unreliable in the early days that's what you did every time you saw one was go wince but Jeff you're going to talk about Battery tech improvements are you back with us I'm back I'm sorry about that I um I'm in Sydney that must be the problem here I think um so uh uh bear with me I that the battery issue is very uh important um and we'll make a distinction uh in future weeks already tonight uh between um a powered device and um and a device that um that that uh has a battery I've um I'll take my example from uh Tad M1 uh trackers we've got one that we sell quite commonly uh uh from Telstra we'll have a little bit of a look at how it uh functions it's got a five-year battery in it or if you make it report often because you can control its reporting functions then it might only last a year but it's designed to be a five-year device many good applications for a device like that and then tell Tonica make one which attaches direct to your car battery um uh and uh it can report a whole lot more so that distinction uh is really important and especially the way it plays in with um cellular networks as well so so uh um basic distinctions here as this Tech evolves so it spawns new opportunity uh and um segments itself into that new opportunity as it goes along battery has other things as well oh sorry power use each had other implications as well BMW told us uh in the early days of vehicle trackers that were using SMS that they could virtually weld off the power that was required to run the things and inevitably whenever they tested a new one but the car would be go flat overnight because they had such small spare capacity on the power rail from the battery and it was not until the early 2000s that they could get a vehicle tracker that didn't flatten the battery on a BMW which was of course this Market segment that really wanted vehicle tracking for security and anti-theft in those days um the other things that happened were as we said before cellular ubiquity really you know once you've got one network that covers nearly everywhere that changes the ball game you know in the early days you can only have two-way radio networks covering a very small area they expanded them a little bit but you could only usually get it at most a few hundred square kilometers cellular as it rolled out from just cities into wider and wider areas made all the difference and again as I said before it's where America sort of shot itself in the foot because in the early days America had at different phone network for every city and they weren't interchangeable you couldn't roam from Network to network with these uh we were aware of a businessman from Australia who used to fly there with 48 phones in the back of his plane because he had to have a different phone in every city and of course that meant that you know you couldn't actually have vehicle tracking work very effectively in that environment certainly not over cellular and the other enabling technology is cloud servers because you know if you're going back and you're having to spend 20 30 40 50 80 000 on physical server infrastructure and then have people like Jeff visit them at all times of the day and night to turn them on and off and install software and upgrade things which is what happened all the time that's a lot different to being able to just buy a slice of a data Surfer from AWS or one of the other suppliers and have things just work for you and more and more you know the cloud is really becoming the cloud whereas before the cloud was something that was kept either in the back of your office or in a data center if you're really lucky and spend a lot of money on it I thought we might Dynamic scalability is that is the key to that isn't it is everyone on the call will be familiar with this though you only buy what you need and you only have to plan a week ahead absolutely and if you're very successful then um no no harm done um and the one thing to say about um cellular ubiquity Shane is that this is this is producing all sorts of hybrids so you get um the the back hole might be satellite um a local network might be uh Bluetooth and your node is smart enough to be able to combine a whole lot of information and ship it back by satellite uh using exception processing and all sorts of smart stuff like that um so we're we're bringing these various Technologies together in various uh constellations to produce the benefit now we're wildly running out of time so I think we will just quickly rush through um a few slides on the uses and everything and then we'll get some questions in at the end uh little has just closed the questions I can see um and we've only got we don't have a pile of questions but we've we've got actually still about a dozen slides to work through so essentially if we're looking now at the users and the uses of iot systems we divide them up into a few areas I mean there's all sorts of different ways you can divide them up this is just one and I will reiterate that our course this week is really it's a short short course in that you know we're only we're trying to cover a lot of iot stuff in a four and a half hours or five hours of of um Talk time and that we do have a subject at Charleston university called ITC 560 The Internet of Things So if you're interested in actual postgraduate University subject that's a good place to start because that covers all the stuff we've we're covering in more detail but we're going to give you as much as much as we can during this so forgive us if we get forget forget things for example like you know solar panels on batteries for uh external devices and stuff there is so much thing that happens on but yes uh if you're looking at different users and users of iot systems there's a group that I call environmentals it's people measuring Rivers dams Lakes sea salinity tidal flaves fire floods uh weather stations uh contaminants in the water for dams uh all of that sort of stuff and uh Jeff you've had experiences with disasters yeah I've had a few disasters in the while um uh an environment is such is so much the key to that and so much and so important for all our futures isn't it too um to be able to measure weather accurately um all right we've got a a project at work which is um uh involves a large device um about the size of a small car it has the ability to float down to to um the bottom of the ocean and to measure the salinity of all the the the ocean around it and to map the ocean currents uh and then a big ship comes along every now and again it floats to the surface and uh um and the data is read off um uh and that that that's an iot system um very complex at the at the monitoring end um uh quite a basic process for collecting the data and the analysis of it again very sophisticated so um it's in intriguing how those various elements of what constitute an iot her program um it uh can be um can be more or less complex um like cows with necklaces and and sharks Shane you've got a picture of the shark and um some of us a bit familiar with this um uh it's a satellite-based uh tracking that um tells people at the beach if there's a wide pointer in the area um uh it's a bit hit and miss unfortunately but it's uh better than killing the Sharks that's for sure well I quite like flake but yes it is it is better in theory and they are protected and there's a lot more of them around now speaking as a surfer but yes there's so and research includes all of these sorts of things so that there is a category of iot systems that are done for Pure research and they're funded by universities and government and they often contribute a lot to what goes on with iot in the longer term and particularly in these sorts of areas the next sort of usage is what we call the industrial internet of things or iiot again it's all of these machineries um monitoring power Gas and Water networks where security is critical as well as reliability and a lot of that is mandated by regulation you know the electricity meter networks if they fail to my to meter a certain number of meters every day for a certain period of time then they actually cop enormous funds from governments in particular in in this country for example they use for machinery for efficiency for maintenance for Effective use and for security as well to stop people getting into the machines and buildings and services we've got you know Security Guys often a building is a commercial building in the center of a CBD these days is harder to get into than Fort Knox honestly you have to sign in you get a tag you pop it against the um the the pass reader and they let you in airflow lighting lifts a lot of that is about saving Power by using those things more effectively and efficiently directing hot air to the coolest parts of the building rather than just trying to warm up one spot all of that sort of stuff it has become more and more widespread and in fact the default basis on it and we're now talking about things like digital twins of buildings where all of those systems are monitored in a virtual map of the building and of course measuring for utilities which we do have a case study on but we might run out of time before we get to it today I'll flip over to the next one Jeff um oh which I was going to talk about which is tracking and I've been involved in vehicle tracking since the beginning and obviously tracking is hugely important for a whole pile of reasons it started it came out of theft and security issues as I said a lot of the original applications were driven by countries like South Africa where vehicle fifth was endemic and murderous and some of the companies that we worked with in the in those days actually send armed response teams after vehicles that were stolen often into neighboring Mozambique for example and they would then recover it at gunpoint and drive the car back and get it fixed but obviously that only lasted fo

2023-10-06 20:06

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