IoT Glossary: 55 Terms You Need to Know
It’s hard to go a day without seeing eye-catching headlines in the IoT space like:
And that’s not getting into the whole “digital transformation” business (personally, I always thought the word “technology” worked just fine, but marketers gonna market).
But if you’re here, that means you already know that more and more devices are being brought online each day. You know that IoT is changing the world. You’re one of the people who want to lead the charge into the future.
Whether your interest is in smart homes, smart cities, edge computing, or IIoT, we’ve compiled a list of devices, protocols, and IoT-centric phrases that you should be aware of while you dive into creating our connected future. If there’s something we missed, let us know in the comments and provide what you think a good definition would be! After all, this is your dictionary.
Actuator: A mechanism that performs a physical task based on input from a connected system.
Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP): An open application layer protocol for message-oriented middleware with a focus on queuing, routing (P2P, PubSub), security, and reliability.
Application Agents: Help address the lack of overhead for end-to-end, peer-to-peer networking in IoT architecture by their presence in the propagator nodes in an enterprise. They move intelligence to the edge of the network to help manage traffic, allow a real-time response to changing IoT conditions, and provide local client services.
Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE): A wireless personal area network (PAN) aimed at devices with reduced power consumption and cost while maintaining a similar communication range to regular Bluetooth.
Chirps: Lighter, purpose-built protocols that allow the “things” in IoT to communicate and interchange. Built for machine-to-machine communication, they are efficient, extensible data frames that have an open-source structure, private data fields, and a simple checksum.
Competing Consumers: A messaging pattern in which more consumers get messages from a common source (i.e. queue), but each message is delivered to only one consumer.
Connected Devices: Components that make up the Internet of Things. Many have built-in sensors and/or actuators and collect data to help users or other devices make informed decisions and monitor or affect outside events.
Connectivity Protection: A part of the Edge Layer that serves to ensure that device connectivity doesn’t fail if there is a network failure or an unreliable connection.
Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP): An application layer protocol used in resource-constrained devices that allows Internet connectivity and remote control.
Data Filtration: A part of the Edge Layer that reduces the amount of transmitted information, but retains the meaning of it.
Device-Agnostic Control: Part of the Edge Layer that provides site abstraction to allow the server and/or cloud application to be agnostic to the device implementation it controls.
Direct Messaging: A messaging mechanism in which the sender and receiver are directly connected or can exchange messages through one or more intermediate hops, which do not take ownership of each message but just forward it (routing).
Edge Gateway: The connecting factor between device analytics and cloud data processing and analytics
Edge Layer: An architectural shift in IoT that breaks the norm of the traditional client-server model. This is the first layer of connectivity for devices to connect to before going to the server. Responsible for the local connectivity of devices and for managing the data collection and connection to this server.
Embedded Device/Systems: A computer with a dedicated function within a larger mechanical or electrical system; it is embedded as part of a complete device.
