The ‘Thin IoT’ stack describes a set of technologies explicitly developed to be optimised for use in constrained environments. This report comprises sections on all five of the elements of the Thin IoT stack, identifying the key technologies that will help optimise any IoT deployment for constrained environments (or just reduce the cost). The five are: device hardware, device software, networking, middleware, and edge computing.
The ‘Thin IoT’ stack describes a set of technologies explicitly developed to be optimised for use in constrained environments. This report comprises sections on all five of the elements of the Thin IoT stack, identifying the key technologies that will help optimise any IoT deployment for constrained environments (or just reduce the cost). These comprise:
‘Device software’, specifically operating system. This section looks at the relative merits of the different embedded OSes such as Amazon FreeRTOS, RIOT, TinyOS and Windows 10 IoT Core.
The ‘networking’ section uses the OSI 7-layer model as a way to describe the various connectivity options available. The section examines access technologies including LPWA, as well as network, transport and application layer protocols such as IP, TCP, UDP, MQTT, CoAP and 6LoWPAN.
The ‘middleware platforms’ segment looks at the various types of platforms and how they have streamlined the process for developing and deploying IoT. This includes some examination of Application Enablement and Connectivity Support platforms and a dive into Device Management Platforms, particularly Lightweight M2M (LwM2M).
Finally, the ‘edge computing and machine learning’ section looks at some of the strides being made to use on-device processing to offset constraints in connectivity, i.e. by performing some element of pre-processing on the data.
