Connectivity and Build Management: (SignaDiag):
As IoT systems are increasingly tending towards a more edge-driven architecture, for a number of good reasons, managing a large number of edge devices in the field can be a monumental challenge. Connectivity of sensors, edge devices, gateways, their buffering capacity, energy harvesting, battery and the build compatibility with each other, can all be sources of large numbers of menaces in supporting the IoT system. Let’s just see a list of how many ways things can go wrong in a practical IoT system:
- Wireless connectivity can go down
- Sensor/Edge device may need power rebooting
- Sensor and Edge may have incompatible build
- Edge analytics need a special update for a couple of devices
- You sold a sensor two years ago and now the customer is bringing it online (can happen in Industrial IoT)
- JSON (or any other format) is not reaching the cloud (can be a connection or edge build issue)
- Edge build is crashing
- API is failing after a minor update in an edge
All the above issues are not a stretch of the imagination. Any practical edge-driven IoT system faces these issues day in and out. If, A-H has to be managed manually, there is absolutely no way one can build any IoT system in scale.
Just assume 100 sensors and 100 edges in a system in a factory. A very modest scale IoT system. A simple combinatorial analysis will show that the factory can experience 3200 IoT failures! That’s in a single factory. As the number of sensors will grow in a system, say to 10,000, the total number of failures will exceed 320,000. It is impossible to manually manage such a complex system without automation of the IoT support system.
SignaGuard (MachineSense®) has built and implemented a scalable IoT system for Novatec for the last 4 years and has learned how to manage A-H in the field via various levels of automation tools. SignaDiag is a set of automation tools to manage your IoT system in scale.
