The various amounts of data collected by smart home devices, connected cars and wearables have many people worried about the potential risk of personal data getting into the wrong hands. The increased number of access points also poses a security risk.

The Federal Trade Commission has expressed concerns, and has recommended that companies take several precautions in order to protect their customers. The FTC, however, doesn’t have the authority to enforce regulations on IoT devices, so it is unclear how many companies will heed its advice.

For example, Apple requires that companies developing products for its HomeKit platform include end-to-end encryption and authentication and a privacy policy. The company also said it doesn’t collect any customer data related to HomeKit accessories.

As with IoT and other popular technology terms, there is no established consensus definition or set of criteria for characterizing what a smart city is. Specific characterizations vary widely, but in general they involve the use of IoT and related technologies to improve energy, transportation, governance, and other municipal services for specified goals such as sustainability or improved quality of life.

The related technologies include:-

GainSpan GS2000 is one such tech which used both ZigBee and Wi-Fi. It makes optimum use of power by putting the device into energy-saving standby mode when no data transmission is taking place. Only when device is awaked or checked for connection failure the high power consumption connection of Wi-Fi is used.

Some important considerations in the Internet of Everything include privacy, security, energy consumption and network congestion.

Currently, there is no single universally recognized set of technical standards for the IoT, especially with respect to communications, or even a commonly accepted definition among the various organizations that have produced IoT standards or related documents.

Many observers agree that a common set of standards will be essential for interoperability and scalability of devices and systems. However, others have expressed pessimism that a universal standard is feasible or even desirable, given the diversity of objects that the IoT potentially encompasses. Several different sets of de facto standards have been in development, and some observers do not expect formal standards to appear before 2017. Whether conflicts between standards will affect growth of the sector as it did for some other technologies is not clear.

Energy consumption can also be an issue. IoT objects need energy for sensing, processing, and communicating information. If objects isolated from the electric grid must rely on batteries, replacement can be a problem, even if energy consumption is highly efficient. That is especially the case for applications using large numbers of objects or placements that are difficult to access. Therefore, alternative approaches such as energy harvesting, whether from solar or other sources, are being developed.

BLE and Wi-Fi together can be used without interference as they are compliable to coexistence protocols. The Bluegiga APx4 is one such solution which supports both BLE and Wi-Fi and is based on 450MHz ARM9 processor.

The term Internet of Things is 16 years old. But the actual idea of connected devices had been around longer, at least since the 70s. Back then, the idea was often called “embedded internet” or “pervasive computing”. But the actual term “Internet of Things” was coined by Kevin Ashton in 1999 during his work at Procter&Gamble. Ashton who was working in supply chain optimization, wanted to attract senior management?s attention to a new exciting technology called RFID. Because the internet was the hottest new trend in 1999 and because it somehow made sense, he called his presentation “Internet of Things”.

Even though Kevin grabbed the interest of some P&G executives, the term Internet of Things did not get widespread attention for the next 10 years.

Use and growth of the IoT can also be limited by the availability of access to high-speed Internet and advanced telecommunications services, commonly known as broadband, on which it depends. While many urban and suburban areas have access, that is not the case for many rural areas, for which private-sector providers may not find establishment of the required infrastructure profitable, and government programs may be limited.

A potential barrier to the development of IoT is the technical limitations of the version of the Internet Protocol (IP) that is used most widely. IP is the set of rules that computers use to send and receive information via the Internet, including the unique address that each connected device or object must have to communicate. Version 4 (IPv4) is currently in widest use. It can accommodate about four billion addresses, and it is close to saturation, with few new addresses available in many parts of the world.

Some observers predict that Internet traffic will grow faster for IoT objects than any other kind of device over the next five years, with more than 25 billion IoT objects in use by 2020,76 and perhaps 50 billion devices altogether. IPv4 appears unlikely to meet that growing demand, even with the use of workarounds such as methods for sharing IP addresses.

Version 6 (IPv6) allows for a huge increase in the number IP addresses. With IPv4, the maximum number of unique addresses, 4.2 billion, is not enough to provide even one address for each of the 7.3 billion people on Earth. IPv6, in contrast, will accommodate over 1038 addresses ? more than a trillion trillion per person.

It is highly likely that to accommodate the anticipated growth in the numbers of Internet-connected objects, IPv6 will have to be implemented broadly. It has been available since 1999 but was not formally launched until 2012. In most countries, fewer than 10% of IP addresses were in IPv6 as of September 2015. Adoption is highest in some European countries and in the United States, where adoption has doubled in the past year to about 20%.

Globally, adoption has doubled annually since 2011, to about 7% of addresses in mid-2015. While growth in adoption is expected to continue, it is not yet clear whether the rate of growth will be sufficient to accommodate the expected growth in the IoT. That will depend on a number of factors, including replacement of some older systems and applications that cannot handle IPv6 addresses, resolution of security issues associated with the transition, and availability of sufficient resources for deployment.

Efforts to transition federal systems to IPv6 began more than a decade ago. According to estimates by NIST, adoption for public-facing services has been much greater within the federal government than within industry or academia. However, adoption varies substantially among agencies, and some data suggest that federal adoption plateaued in 2012. Data were not available for this report on domains that are not public-facing, and it is not clear whether adoption of IPv6 by federal agencies will affect their deployment of IoT applications.

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