×
Community Blog Challenges for Internet of Things (IoT) Network

Challenges for Internet of Things (IoT) Network

In the advent of IoT technology, many enterprises may face some challenges. In this article, you will get some information on some challenges for IoT network.

In the development of IoT technology, many enterprises may face some challenges, like for IoT network. In this article, we will discuss about the challenges you may face for IoT network.

Connectivity

Connectivity is the first concerning issue, i.e., how to connect devices to the Internet and the cloud computing platform. However, to a great extent, this is determined by the device application environment and the type of communication infrastructure provided to these devices.

For example, if you need to develop a smart home device, such as an online toaster, you may access a Wi-Fi home router or a ZigBee/Z-Wave IoT router. Therefore, your device must support one or more transmission media. However, in some environments, such as the agriculture IoT or smart cars, access to the Wi-Fi network is unavailable, and the mobile network may be your only choice for connection.

Therefore, you must balance your choice and make design decisions based on possibilities provided by every option and investments. For example, it may be expensive to transmit data through a cellular network to the cloud service, but you may determine to select the function first mode or the blockchain mode to build an IoT ecosystem that is less dependent on cloud computing.

Security and Privacy

IoT security has always been a controversial issue. The first challenge to be considered is that security and privacy of IoT are fundamentally different from network security that we've known. The following lists some key points for security design that are considerable:

  1. Physical Security: IoT devices are often located in open fields, and are unattended and not physically protected. You must ensure that they will not be maliciously tampered with by vicious organization, breached by hackers, or operated using a flat-head screwdriver. Also, you must protect data that gets stored on the devices in any form. Although it is costly to embed a security protection component on every IoT device, it is still important to encrypt data on these devices.
  2. Security of Data Exchange: Data protection is also important because data must get transmitted from the IoT sensors and devices to the gateway, and then to the cloud. Therefore, use of encrypted transfer protocols is a must. In addition to encryption, you must also consider the authentication and authorization to ensure IoT security.
  3. Security of Cloud Storage: Data stored in the cloud is equally fragile as other parts of the IoT ecosystem. Your platform should be able to protect data stored in the cloud. Protection measures include appropriate encryption, access control, and so on.
  4. Update: Security vulnerabilities always exist no matter how much efforts you pay to enhance your product code and hardware. In this case, you must first have a plan to fix errors and quickly release patches, instead of leaving the errors unfixed for a long period. Next, you must provide customers with a direct and secure method to fix errors. Currently, it is popular to update online devices over the air, but you must ensure that the above method itself will not become a security vulnerability.

For more information about the challenges you may met for IoT devices, you go to Four Challenges to be Considered When Developing IoT Devices.

Related Blog Posts

Strategic IoT Transformation for Carriers in Four Steps

Leading carriers play a crucial supporting role enterprise IoT initiatives. This article addresses how carriers can improve their enterprise IoT services in four simple steps.

On the network level, carriers must transition to composite networks that support multiple communication technologies and centers on mobile network services that allow people to communicate with each other.

LTE-based networks and hybrid NB-IoT/eMTC networks can meet the requirements of IoT communication scenarios regarding wide coverage, low power consumption, low costs, and a certain degree of portability. Additionally, through sustained network construction and optimization, carriers can provide the flexible network communication support most suitable to the needs of IoT industry customers and move toward 5G. This will allow them to comprehensively cover the needs of narrowband massive-volume applications, high bandwidth applications, critical applications, and other IoT scenarios.

SD-WAN and IPv6 for Effective IoT Deployment

For enterprises, IoT simplifies businesses through automation and helps enterprises reduce costs. IoT also helps businesses efficiently collect data to explore new opportunities and increase productivity. Big data analysis, sensor networks, and dedicated applications through the network are some tools used by enterprises to maximize their profits through IoT.

IoT also has a profound impact on today's network infrastructures. However, most networks are unable to support the data flood from the massive number of IoT devices. Because of this shortcoming, these networks are unable to fully tap the potential of IoT.

Related Documentation

Collection - embedded IoT

Internet of Things (IoT) is enjoying high growth. More and more devices are being applied to our daily life, such as intelligent routers, various TV dongles, Tmall Genie, and robot vacuum cleaners, bringing us the convenience of intelligence. According to Gartner’s prediction, 20 billion intelligent devices will be put into service by the end of 2020, which gives a glimpse of the huge market in this field. The embedded development in traditional software field is faced with great challenges in the IoT device field. Besides the large number and wide distribution, IoT devices are difficult to debug and restricted in hardware, so traditional device log solutions cannot meet the demands perfectly.

In the IoT field, based on years of development experience in Logtail and the characteristics of IoT devices in terms of CPU, memory, disk, network, and application mode, we have developed a log data collection solution for IoT devices: C-Producer.

Compare data forwarding solutions on IoT Platform

In many scenarios, you must process the data that is reported by devices or use the data for business applications. You can forward device data by either using the IoT Platform service subscription or the rules engine data forwarding function. This topic compares the various data forwarding solutions and application scenarios that are supported by IoT Platform to help you select a forwarding solution that best suits your needs.

Related Products

IoT Platform

Alibaba Cloud IoT Platform provides secure and reliable communication between devices and the IoT Platform which allows you to manage a large number of devices on a single IoT Platform and supports device access worldwide, from a variety of networks and providers that are all based on different protocols.

Automotive Logistics Solution

Alibaba Cloud offers robust automobile monitoring and management solutions with various algorithms, analytical models and multi-type data convergence embedded. The vehicle network architecture consists of four stages: IoT, service, big data zone and business intelligence.

0 0 0
Share on

Alibaba Clouder

2,605 posts | 747 followers

You may also like

Comments

Alibaba Clouder

2,605 posts | 747 followers

Related Products

  • IoT Platform

    Provides secure and reliable communication between devices and the IoT Platform which allows you to manage a large number of devices on a single IoT Platform.

    Learn More
  • IoT Solution

    A cloud solution for smart technology providers to quickly build stable, cost-efficient, and reliable ubiquitous platforms

    Learn More
  • Global Internet Access Solution

    Migrate your Internet Data Center’s (IDC) Internet gateway to the cloud securely through Alibaba Cloud’s high-quality Internet bandwidth and premium Mainland China route.

    Learn More