Rethinking the Internet of Things: A Scalable Approach to Connecting Everything

It is not often that one gets to read a manifesto, but that's exactly what you get in Francis daCosta's "Rethinking the Internet of Things: A Scalable Approach to Connecting Everything." Why a manifesto? Because although the author agrees with the commonly accepted view that the Internet of Things (IoT) is the next big thing, he makes a strong case for the position that, simply put, almost everyone is thinking about it wrong.People, he argues, are focused on the question of how to get addresses to the billions, or actually hundreds of billions, of devices that will make up the IoT. And, so, they focus on the complete rollout of IPv6 with its massive address space, and then leap to the conclusion that once all of these devices have their IPv6 address, the IoT is inevitable. daCosta, however, puts that assumption to the test. The question he asks is, what are these devices that will make up the IoT, what will they be trying to do, what will they need to do it, and how much complexity can they support? His answer is that most of the devices will be conveyors of very small pieces of information (a rain gauge here, a heat sensor there) that will will only become interesting when aggregated into larger sets of information. (Infinitesimal data to small data to big data.) Burdening these devices with the cost and complexity of a full IP stack, says daCosta, is unreasonable, impractical, wasteful, and, worst of all, detrimental to the promise of the IoT. That promise, he writes, is the ability to "gather data from interesting end devices ... discovered by searching out small data streams from specific classes of device, location, or other characteristics." IP, with its technical complexity (read: "cost") and inherent point-to-point nature, is ill-suited to the problem of making small amounts of data from simple machines generally available to more complicated machines that will be able to make use of it.The solution daCosta proposes takes, as its inspiration, an unlikely model of massive information transfer -- the natural world. The author writes that nature has solved the problem of how to move small bits of information from one place to another in a way that can massively scale in much the same way that the IoT will need to do. At the heart of the idea is the concept of a receiver oriented design, and the recognition that any single piece of information is likely to be unimportant, and small, and that massive redundancy is a way of ensuring that messages are received. So, for example, daCosta takes the example of flowers and pollen. When flowers spread pollen to other flowers, they don't set up point-to point connections to ensure the delivery of the pollen, with appropriate ACKs and retransmissions in the event of transmission failure (the IP model). Rather, flowers send out massive amounts of pollen via whatever vectors are available (wind, bees) because the arrival of any specific pollen grain is unimportant. And it's much less costly to simply send out a lot of pollen then to create the signaling necessary to ensure pollen delivery from one flow to another. The only thing that is important is that some grains do reach a compatible flower. And on this point, again, it is the receiver who decides whether the pollen that reaches it is interesting, or not. Rose pollen reaching an oak tree will be ignored. Reaching a human nose it may cause sneezing. But when reaching a rose, it will result in incredible beauty.So it is, daCosta argues, with the Internet of Things. There will be massive numbers of small devices sending individually unimportant pieces of information which he calls, in a nod to the inspiration of his idea, "chirps". Birds chirping is another example of the use of highly redundant, small pieces of information intended for any receiver that knows how to make use of them. Any given chirp is not important, but the information that the device is trying to chirp may be important. As it is in nature, the IoT can use massive redundancy of any given, tiny message, to ensure eventual delivery. And these chirping devices need not be burdened with the high costs and complexity of an IP stack. Simpler, cheaper, more effective devices will suffice. More than suffice, actually. It is this model, and not a pure IP model, that will allow the IoT to scale to accommodate the coming wave of connected devices.The manifesto does not stop there, however. daCosta lays out a complete description of how these small chirps will be gathered up by more intelligent receivers, and how these multitudes of small data streams will be groomed and aggregated into, finally, big data streams that will be delivered to traditional Internet applications for collation, analysis, and decision-making. The book is not short on detail, and if you are interested in bits and bytes, daCosta offers those up as well in, for example, his "Skeletal Architecture of Chirp Packets". But for this reader, those details are secondary to big idea that this book presents: that the coming IoT presents challenges not seen by the current Internet, not solvable by simply having more addresses, and analogous in many ways to natural systems which offer useful blueprints towards a solution.One brief aside. This book contains sentences like this one: "Over time, an agent-based, machine-to-machine social network emerges, tapping into the full richness of data offered by the Internet of Things." If after reading this book you aren't starting to see how the world of "The Terminator" can come about, and aren't starting to believe that it actually might be possible, you must not have read the same book I did.

The previous reviewer gave the book an undeserved 1 star because daCosta emphasizes that the billions of tiny low power devices don't need IPv6 stacks to fulfill their missions. Which, I would think if you simply apply Occam's razor, this is obviously true. I think the previous reviewer didn't really read deep into the text as well. A lot of the ideas that the author puts forth are somewhat of a stretch and it's somewhat obvious that he doesn't have a deep operations background. But the purpose of the book is to provoke rethinking on the approach to IoT and I think it does that job very well.

Easily approachable and still detailed enough explanation about his three layer IoT-architecture. Rationale for the layering is well justified and makes sense. We need alternatives to IP-stack based devices for sure to push the cost down and make the IoT manageable. The analytics side is covered quite lightly and the industry examples in the end have been mostly repeated in many sources. The chirp protocol standardization input and the autonomous network system logic is the most valueable stuff in the book. As a free offering in Kindle (at least at the time of writing this) this book is definitely worth reading for anyone wondering how the approaching IoT could be implemented...

The book makes the case for a lightweight network protocol for edge devices based on the premise that IP is a too heavy administrative burden for very inexpensive devices. I like the idea of the propagators that will capture the 'chirps' of low cost devices and translate them into IP traffic that can be understood by Big Data analytical engines. The author also writes about 'promiscuous' sharing of chirp data that can be leveraged by other users and propagators. Very egalitarian but problematic for security and control reasons.One tough nut to crack will be the establishment of chirp standards. Without the standards, the promiscuous chirping won't be understood by other propagators in the neighborhood. The author's approach will take time but the benefits are clear.

This provides a good overview on how future IoT applications, mainly focusing on devices, gateways and how connectivity should be designed. The book provides interesting concepts on using edge gateways and streaming data from small set of devices instead of doing bulk processing on edge gateway or cloud. However, the book lacks implementation details and its more about a point of view, so those looking for any implementation details might not appreciate this book.

This book has a perspective on IoT that I hadn't seen before. Very creative use of low tech combined with extensive application. It uses a lot of analogies that made it easy to understand then build on them in a practical manner then further applying to a complex system. I bought it on a whim but it opened my eyes to some real business potential. I recommend it to anyone who is implanting IoT.

This is of course a very known bestseller and it really lives up to the expectation, gets you thinking about the overall concept and creates awareness about the field. Would recommend it to anyone who did not read it

Fantastic examples in real word to explain the technical examples throughout the book. Easier to understand the technical data. I am going to pursue the subject because of this book.

There are some nice concepts here and the first third of the book is an interesting read. However, problems set in when technical solutions are proposed as it is clear that the level of understanding of practical network protocol issues is veneer thin and once broken a lot of absurdity flows out. Personally, I found the constant use of the pollen metaphor rather irritating. Metaphores only hold up so long and this one gets well worn out.

Francis daCosta draws fascinating comparisons to nature in order to explain concepts fundamental to the subject of IoT. In fact, I got what I wanted from the book in respect of IoT and am now thinking about how the analogies may be relevant to other things!

Basically a good book, and the author correctly sees that most of the sensors will be of limited cost and intelligence and shouldn't be burdened with heavy protocol stacks such as IPv6 or similar.My negative comment is that the book could have been half the size. A number of the points were stated over and over and over.

Author constructs a basic premise that current network stacks (IPv6) are too expensive on both an implementation basis and silicon basis. I strongly disagree with this premise, that these stacks are going to end up becoming cheaper as the implementations are going to be commoditized.

Il libro è interessante anche se personalmente non l'ho trovato abbastanza dettagliato su alcuni punti. Va bene come introduzione per chi si avvicina a questo mondo ma niente di più.