IoT's Biggest Challenges

Advances in IoT related technology and the reduction of costs have helped accelerate the adoption of IoT. However, there remain key challenges which still need to be resolved.

Hardened Sensor Devices: Sensor devices provide the communications, data storage and processing capabilities for the actual sensors used to capture data. Today, most companies use hobby boards (i.e. Raspberry Pi) and author their own software for IoT efforts, which is highly unstable and not designed for large-scale production use. One alternative considered is to work with sensor and circuit board manufacturers to develop custom solutions which are expensive and have a long development cycle. OpenWare™ Sensor Devices have been hardened over 10 years in production use in some of the most challenging environments possible. OpenWare™ has the 60 most common sensor types already integrated, and the base OpenWare™ Sensor Device design has seven open ports on each device. OpenWare™ can be extended to support up to 10,000 additional sensor types as well.

Standardization of Communication Protocols and Interoperability: The communication protocols (Wi-Fi, BlueTooth, Zigbee, LoRaWan, etc.) used to transmit sensor data to an IoT Platform or cloud storage facility are not interoperable with each other and compete for dominance. This results in companies essentially hedging their bets when designing IoT solutions on which protocols to use as their IoT standard. Additionally, these protocols do not have mid-range transmission capabilities (300 feet to 1/2 mile) resulting in more complex and expensive network designs. The OpenWare™ hardware line can utilize both it s own proprietary, mid-rage communications protocol as well as support utilization of any additional protocol, making it interoperable with all other currently available communication standards. This allows companies to maximize utilization of all communications protocols in their IoT network designs and to more easily integrate with existing IoT networks.

Security: IoT security has been making the news lately and is a key focus of the industry moving forward. Some of the underlying challenges result from a lack of hardened sensor devices that are designed around strict security standards and the vulnerability of data during communication from the sensor in the field to an IoT Platform or cloud based storage facility. Security has been a key concern from the initial designs of the OpenWare™ hardware line. The OpenWare™ Sensor Devices, Gateways and Routers have a firmware-based operating system which prevents anyone from tampering with the device or inserting malware. The OpenWare™ Communications Protocol encrypts each transmission from the Sensor Device all the way through to the IoT Platform.