Internet of Things

Imagine you could control your car with your computer, analyze the Tyre pressure, engine temperature, calibrate the intricacies of its transmission system from your tablet; your car would have had an IP.  It can be a person with a heart monitor implant, a farm animal with a Bio-chip transponder, or any other natural or man-made object that can be assigned an IP address and provided with the ability to transfer data over a network. Everything can now be controlled, remotely. This is what is called Internet of Things. The Internet of Things (IoT) is the interconnection of uniquely identifiable embedded computing devices within the existing Internet infrastructure. So far, the Internet of Things has been most closely associated with machine-to-machine communication in manufacturing and power, oil and gas utilities.

IPv6’s huge increase in address space is an important factor in the development of the Internet of Things. The address space expansion means that we could “assign an IPV6 address to every atom on the surface of the earth, and still have enough addresses left to do another 100+ earths.” In other words, humans could easily assign an IP address to every "thing" on the planet. An increase in the number of smart machines, as well as the amount of upstream data the nodes generate, is expected to raise new concerns about data privacy, data sovereignty and security. 

Today computers -- and, therefore, the Internet -- are almost wholly dependent on human beings for information. Nearly all of the roughly 50 Petabytes of data available on the Internet were first captured and created by human beings by typing, pressing a record button, taking a digital picture or scanning a bar code. 

The problem is, people have limited time, attention and accuracy -- all of which means they are not very good at capturing data about things in the real world. If we had computers that knew everything there was to know about things -- using data they gathered without any help from us -- we would be able to track and count everything and greatly reduce waste, loss and cost. We would know when things needed replacing, repairing or recalling and whether they were fresh or past their best.