Solution architecture & design
Solution architecture & design
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Solution architecture & design
The Internet of Things (IoT) involves an entire ecosystem of tools and services that must come together to deliver a complete solution.
Representative architectures for specific IoT use cases have emerged over the last few years. These can be used for inspiration when designing an IoT architecture that meets your own requirements.
The IoT Architecture stack
IoT devices and systems
IoT devices make up the physical hardware component of your solution.
- For Industrial Equipment Monitoring, these could be engines and engine controllers.
- For Smart Environment use cases, they might be motion sensors or badge readers.
- For Asset Tracking, these would be GPS trackers.
Choosing your IoT devices
It's often easiest to use off-the-shelf IoT devices and add them to existing environments or pieces of equipment. However, this can sometimes introduce problems accessing the data. Many vendors provide siloed solutions that work well for particular issues but don't integrate easily into broader applications.
When investigating hardware solutions, confirm data can be accessed through local protocols like Modbus, Serial, or OPC UA. Some vendors might also have a cloud service that allows you to access the data through an API.
Enabling communication
In most IoT solutions, devices send state data to and receive commands from a centralized IoT Platform. There are several options for connecting devices to this platform, depending on your environment and device constraints:
- Cellular connectivity is a good choice if a device is outside and moving around. This setup is customary in asset-tracking use cases.
- Ethernet or Wi-Fi connections may be available if a device is indoors in a home or building environment.
- If a device is battery-powered, you might want to investigate low-power options like Bluetooth Low Energy or LPWAN.
Choosing an IoT platform
Your IoT Platform is the central data warehouse and orchestration engine for your solution. It's not easy to build a secure and scalable platform, and we recommend choosing a partner to provide this for you.
Choosing the right platform can be a complicated process. Below is the platform evaluation checklist from our guide, IoT Implementation From Concept to Production:
- Five things to consider when designing an IoT Solution:
- Who are the users of the solution?
- What data do they need to access?
- How are these users grouped?
- How will they consume the information? (Dashboards, Reports, Alerts, Mobile applications)
- What is the Solution Hierarchy?
The architecture of an IoT platform
IoT platforms have particular architecture requirements for enabling your solution. Understanding what a well-designed platform looks like can help you when you're choosing a partner.
The architecture of an IoT Solution
The IoT application determines how you or your customers engage with the data collected from IoT devices. It's where the value of your solution is realized. Deploying hardware and collecting sensor data is pointless unless you present it in meaningful ways to solve real-world problems for your customers.
The end-user experience could be a mobile app, website, desktop application, or even a passive report that no one interacts with directly. These can be challenging and time-consuming to build. When investigating IoT platforms, look for application enablement platforms to increase your efficacy.
