Sensor Plug and Play concept

Introduction

Because complexity of integration is one of the most important IoT project failure cause we designed Plug and Play feature.

Pilot Things Sensor Plug and Play feature decreases IoT complexity by making sensors easy to use. The sensor may use all the connectivity technologies supported by Pilot Things. 

The problem

More than 15 majors communication technologies are used to connect IoT sensors. In the difference of IP protocols that is now widely used for the computers, the trend for IoT is to have more protocols (for instance NB-IoT is coming soon). From Pilot Things perspective, these technologies could be divided in 3 main types:

• Type 1 : Long range Non IP protocols so called LPWAN (LoRa, Sigfox...)
• Type 2 : Long range IP protocols using Internet to communicate (cellular, wifi...),
• Type 3: Short range protocols that need a gateway to communicate thanks to a long range protocol,

The graph here under represents some technology depending of their range and rate.

Problem 1 :

The companies do not choice a communication technology they choose a sensor to answer a business need. So you will have no choice but to have multiple communication technologies.

Problem 2 :

Suppose you decide to use only 1 communication protocol, then to avoid sensor vendor locking you need to be sure that different sensors could work the same way.

Pilot Things solution

To answer these two majors problems Pilot Things IoT VPN has a layered approach for IoT :

• Sensor connectivity layer : connect the sensors Plug and Play regardless of the technology to the transport layer
• Transport layer : transport the message and command from and to the sensors
• Abstraction layer : common representation of physical sensors

The layers are depicted here under: