Analysis of Internet of Things Based on Characteristics, Functionalities, and Challenges

Introduction

In last decade, technology changes (Feki, Kawsar, Boussard, & Trappeniers, 2013) making an impact on human lives, the Internet of Things (IoT) has transpired as the main research area. IoT consists of billions of smart interconnected devices and is considered as a part of the future Internet. The next generation of the Internet will consist of diversified interconnected nodes that will expand the connectivity with virtual components and hardware entities. The Internet of Things (IoT) enhances the interconnected nodes with new possibilities and potential. The enormous growth in the number of statutory nodes is being interconnected over the Internet at an unbelievable rate giving the preamble of the IoT. A simple illustration of such nodes is a smart city (Jiang, 2020) consist of automatic security alert, water management system, alarm and emergency system, smart parking system (Atif et al., 2020), etc. There are various fields where IoT can have a main role to enhance the standard of our quality life. These fields include smart homes, smart cities, health care fields, agriculture, natural disaster systems, and security and emergency alert systems, etc.

The IoT provides the facility to nodes to listen (Hassija et al., 2019), see and whatever data they collect to communicate that data to a centralized server or data warehouse for further manipulations. Various smart devices are designed to perform domain-specific tasks while unpredictable computing and (horizontal markets) systematic services form autonomous services that are application domain-specific. The IoT converts these nodes to smart devices by utilizing fundamental technologies such as sensor and ubiquitous networks, complex calculations, hardware devices, connection technologies, various applications and network set of rules. For example, in industry smart devices (Li et al., 2018) enables most of the work to do it automatically right from raw material shifting to process the complete product, testing, dispatch it after that also monitoring and maintenance is handled by smart IoT devices. To match market and industry demand, technology and applications should change in proportion to satisfy stakeholder demands concerning time. A new set of rules is required to manage data flow between smart devices, vehicles, data centers, living things, etc.

IoT has an impact on the world economy in the last decade. Now, most of the governments are investing in creating IoT infrastructure. Billions of sensors or devices are used to establish an IoT network, to provide the unique IP address to each node is a critical task and needs to be done with utmost care. Privacy, confidentiality, and anonymization (Condra, 2015) are things to handle carefully in IoT network, as a huge amount of data flowing from one network to another integrity of data should be maintained. Moreover, architecture standardization must be done to ease the process of IoT infrastructure or product building. The IoT challenges should be mapped with traditional Internet architecture that needs to be modified. Things that wish to connect to the internet must follow standardized protocols. As per the survey takes place in 2010, the number of connected nodes on the earth crossed the overall population of the world. The IoT is making various things in routine work easy, automated and efficient tasks can be executed. The innovation in IoT started giving its fill, but still many challenges are there to overcome, to make it the world’s leading technology. This enormous growth in the field Internet of Things in upcoming years motivated to make this research article through which the young researchers will get brief idea about characteristics, functionalities and challenges of Internet of Things. At the concluding remark of this research article researcher are able to identify what the IoT is, how it functions and what are the challenges still available to work on. Chapter II provides a literature review, chapter III describes various fundamental characteristics of the Internet of Things. Chapter IV elaborates on functionalities of IoT as well as various sensors used in IoT. Chapter V discusses challenges in IoT. Based on the survey done conclusion is provided at the last.