The Internet of Things Industry Brings Challenges to the Software Industry

The Internet of Things is widely used in many fields such as intelligent transportation, basic surveying, industrial monitoring, environmental protection, urban planning, public safety, food traceability, and smart medical care. With the continuous development of technology and applications, it can be predicted that the Internet of Things will bring profound changes to people's lives and work methods. However, while the Internet of Things brings many benefits, it also brings unprecedented challenges to the entire information technology field.

In the Internet of Things system, a large number of sensor nodes continuously transmit the collected data to the data center, thus forming a massive amount of data flow. The data center not only needs to understand these data, but also needs to analyze and process these data in a timely manner so as to achieve effective perception and control. Through analysis, it is not difficult for us to see that the Internet of Things has the following characteristics, and it poses a great challenge to software technology. The following points need to strengthen the research of key technologies and form an effective solution.

1) Heterogeneity of sensor nodes and sampling data The IoT system includes various sensors, such as traffic sensors, hydrological sensors, geological sensors, weather sensors, and biomedical sensors, each of which includes Many specific sensors, such as traffic sensors, include GPS sensors, RFID sensors, office identification sensors, electrophotographic identification sensors, traffic flow sensors (infrared, coils, optical, video sensors), traffic sensors, and vehicle condition sensors. These sensors are not only different in structure and function, but also the collected data are heterogeneous. This heterogeneity greatly increases the difficulty of software development and data processing.

2) The scale of the massive IoT terminals for IoT nodes and data will be several times that of the Internet. In 2020, the scale of IoT terminals will probably reach the level of 100 billion, and in 2030, it may reach the scale of trillions. The amount of data generated by these terminals is also massive, and the data size will increase from hundreds of EB today to hundreds of ZB. Mass data storage, transmission and timely processing will face unprecedented challenges.

3) Timeliness of Internet of Things data The Internet of Things data reflects the status of sensors at the time of data collection. For example, the sampling value of the airport fuel tank temperature sensor is valid only for a specified time range (eg 1 minute). Once the time is exceeded, the sensor sampling value is no longer valid. In addition, because the sensor data reflects the physical state of the monitored target, the slow response of the system beyond the specified time range may result in catastrophic results, which requires that the Internet of Things system must have the ability to respond quickly.

4) The space-time sensitivity of Internet of Things data is different from ordinary Internet nodes. There are generally spatial and temporal nature of IoT nodes—each node has an address location, each data sample has a time attribute, and many nodes have geography. The location is still continuously changing and moving with time. For example, in an intelligent transportation system, each vehicle is equipped with a high-precision GPS and moves dynamically in a traffic network. The locations and migratory routes tracked by the migratory bird tracking system via GPS are also dynamically changing over time. Even with fixed sensors, the number of idle cars collected by sensors in a garage is a time- and space-related value. From this we can see that the intelligent management of space and time attributes of the IoT nodes is crucial.

5) High security and privacy of the Internet of Things The cost of chips and other components required to produce the Internet of Things is also relatively high. It is not yet realistic to put all the items into the identification chip. Another challenge is how to implement data security and privacy protection.

In the Internet of Things, since objects are more closely linked and even objects and people are connected, how to protect a large amount of data and user privacy has become an urgent problem to be solved.

Security and privacy protection is an eternal theme in the field of information technology, and the Internet of Things takes security and privacy requirements to a new height. Due to the large number of privacy-sensitive devices connected to the Internet of Things, such as cameras, recording devices, location tracking devices, fingerprint collectors, medical sensors, etc., improper protection may result in a large amount of private information being stolen and illegally used. In addition, the access of objects also brings many new problems such as covert channel problems based on physical quantity and privacy leakage problems, such as the privacy information of family activities can be inferred through current changes in the family.