IoT Applications and Protocols: An Air Quality Monitoring Example

One of the dominating technologies coming along with the upheaval of wireless communications in the 5G era is the Internet of Things (IoT). Promising to make even the smallest devices like sensors and actuators “smart” and allow them to connect over the network, this technology is associated with a vast number of diverse applications: from smart home, to smart city and smart farming applications, to industrial and healthcare applications. Such an abundance of applications and variety of characteristics poses a serious problem from communication point of view since communication networks so far have been designed and engineered to connect human-to-human (H2H). Large amounts of data are transferred with min delay between well-defined end users. The new paradigm of M2M communications envisages connecting many billions of anonymous devices, for probably only a few kbps or keep devices connected for very long periods of time in unattended, unreachable areas where they have to survive on their limited power supply. Existing communication protocols and architectures are mostly unsuitable for this new type of communications. So, in the last decade we have seen a lot of research and standardization work in designing network protocols that will suit the needs of IoT. In this paper we discuss the characteristics of M2M communications, the protocols suitable to IoT systems and present an example application for air quality monitoring realized in Turkey.