Iot components use a wired or wireless computer network to connect and communicate.

Network components of IoT and edge computing

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- Please join us for Network Components of IoT, and Edge Computing right now. - [Announcer] You're watching ITProTV. (upbeat music) Hello, welcome back to CIoTP, I'm Zach and that guy's Justin, and he's the person with all the answers. So Network Components and then of course we're talking, about Edge Computing still? - Yep. - So tell us more. - Alright, so some of you're like, well hold on Justin, we just talked, about physical components. - We did. - And I thought network components, were physical components. - Yes. - And well, you're not wrong, but there's some other aspects of networking that, you know what? Maybe a little beyond a physical, tangible thing. So let's just start at the beginning, and talk about when I have these IoT devices, that I'm going to deploy in my business, my home, whatever, what are some considerations? Well, I need to worry about wired kind of computing. Right? - Right. - So I plug in an Ethernet cord, that is going to be by and large, how you're going to connect most things, at least in my experience. That's not all there can be. There's no specialized connections. So I have Ethernet. I have a bunch of Legacy Hardware, PROFIBUS, PROFINET, HART/Modbus. These are just all of these data carrying bus systems. For me, most of my wired connections, are going to be, USB, which aren't necessarily going to be networking, and Ethernet, which is going to serve as my networking layer. Now some of you're like, we don't want running wires everywhere, is that? Zach, do you have actually physical networks in your house? Do you have the little blue cables everywhere? - Certainly, well, not everywhere, but in two different positions I do. Yeah. - Okay. - So we have Ethernet in two different rooms. - Okay, so you have Ethernet drops, in a couple of rooms. - Yes. - Which is handy, my house doesn't, that's on my to-do list, to run a couple of Ethernet drops for a variety of reasons. - Yep. - But by and large, I suspect in your house, most of your devices are connected without wiring. - Oh, wireless, wireless, wireless all the time. - And guess what? That's our next component of networking. Many of these devices the ESP devices, Raspberry Pis, Arduinos a long time, since they don't come with them, you can get an add-on, that allows you to add networking capabilities, or even Bluetooth capabilities, which is another form of wireless. Now there are are some other ones, that maybe aren't used as much, but for your application, may be helpful. RFID, Near-field communication, NFC. ZigBee, cellular-satellite connections, right now. You're like (sighs), well, when will we use the cellular. Maybe you have remote nodes, that are gathering information, right? Forestry services, things of that nature. There's picking up information. And then periodically, they phone home. I actually thought about deploying. So Red Box was getting very big. Technically they have an IoT device in them, 'cause it's taking all your transaction data. It's phoning home. So, I was looking at deploying, not a Red Box, in my hometown, when they just started getting popular, but something similar and managing those. But part of that was setting up connectivity. So you could upload all the transactions for credit cards, at the end of the day, I ended up not doing that, but that's a whole different story, (Zach laughing) but this was something that I had difficulty, because okay, do I have a wire connection? Is that something that the location, where I'm going to drop this, is it capable? Or am I going to have to go with wireless, and do they have internet that I can use? Or am I going to have to use something like satellite, or cellular service, and add a little antenna. So, you got to juggle. I needed long range connections that was not tied to the particular business. So we looked at solutions. Me and my friend, that you sell your service to report home. Back home in my hometown, cellular services is a little, Ify at times. So speeds, we were just going to have to deal with that. They were going to be a long pull, at the end of the day, but this is going to work mostly for us. Now there's some other ones, LoRa, LoRaWAN, and then all of your Wi-Fi, 802.11, kind of specifications. Those are going to provide wireless connections. Now, Zach, I'll tell you, we don't even think about it very much, but when we're transmitting this information, wired or wireless, there has to be some kind of structure to it. There has to be some kind of ceremony, right? For instance, let's back up, Zach, do you still send letters, physical letters? - I actually did yesterday. I sent four of them actually. - So every once in a while-- - Put them in the mailbox. - I still have to send physical letters, packages, right? - Yeah. - But there's a ceremony to that, right? - Yeah. - You put your return address at the upper left hand corner, you put the send address in the middle. A stamp in the upper right hand corner. Technically you're not supposed to put the stamp, upside down. - No. - So, but they're pretty lax on that. So the stamp has to be right side of, and then you have a care of, if it's going to a business, there's all of this ceremony, or protocol that you need to follow, and believe it or not, networking has similar things. - [Zach] Ooh. - Yes, so we have a protocol that we have to obey, for these connections. Now protocols are all over the place, right? We have TCP, IP, which is, a lower level protocol. We have UDP, another protocol. Protocols are just the set of ceremonies, that you engage in order to either make a connection, or accomplish some task. Mailing a letter, is something that we do, when I had dial-up internet-- - [Zach] You have mail. (Justin chuckles) - I had another protocol. I got to open this little connection box. I got to type in my password, I got to click. It does the thing, it makes the connection. Boom, hopefully call waiting doesn't kick you off. For IoT devices, there's many protocols that you can use, but I'm want to highlight three, technically four, that are going to be used. MQTT and I think I may have made a mention of that, in some previous episodes. That stands for MQ Telemetry Transport. So how am I going to send that information? An MQTT is a publish-subscribe model. So over here on, I guess, yeah, the right, your right? Yeah, crazy stuff. There's an MQTT broker, which is just hanging out going, I'm waiting for messages, (Zach laughing) and then there's going to be a publisher. Usually those are devices, and it's going to go, hey broker, I got a message for you. It's published on this topic and here's the information. And essentially a topic is a queue, right, it's a line. Have you ever been to the DMV, and you go E41? - Yes. - Right. E would be the topic, or yeah, we'll just say that, A, would be the topic, or however they do the queuing system, So you know what line to go into, and then there's going to be additional information, in the DMV example, it'll be 41, 42, whatever it may be. And that's how you're progressed through the queue. And also that's how information is transported, to wherever it needs to be. That's the same thing for an MQTT broker. If I go, hey, there's a cheese topic, and I need you to publish blue cheese on that topic, right? I'm sure Megan's going, please stop putting your hands around your mouth. Let's say I was just coughing, (Zach laughing) so I'm going to stop doing that. But it goes into that queue. And then if Zach's like, man I need to know what's going on in cheese land, click. Oh, blue cheese. I wonder if he means Gorgonzola. He's a subscriber to that. That's how typically an MQTT system behaves. If I had a device, it's going to be publishing out, right, it could be temperature readings, precipitation readings, wind speed, position GPS. It's going to be publishing those out. Those are going to go through a network connection, of some sort, wire to wireless, and publish to the broker. And then any other subscriber, maybe my phone, maybe Zach's computer, maybe an alarm system somewhere. It's going to be subscribing to a particular topic. And then those messages are going to be delivered, and I'm going to react accordingly. Now this shows one way, you can be a publisher, and a subscriber at the same time. So you can... It's bidirectional and everybody finds out where everything, as far as dipping up based on topic. Now that's MQ Telemetry Transport, or MQTT. - Got it. - There's a similar one called AMQP, Advanced Message Queuing Protocol. It works in a very similar way, there's an AMQP broker, RabbitMQ is a popular one. I'm not going to set that up, I don't use those very much. The MQTT works for my use cases. I have played with like RabbitMQ, and, there's another one that I played with, I forget which one it is. Oh, crazy stuff. (Zach chuckles) It's weird how your mind is. So that's going to behave very similar to, it's going to have a bunch of queues. They're going to publish to those queues. You're going to read messages off those cues, and I'm going to do something with those messages. It's similar to a Publish-Subscribe model. The other protocol or protocols, that you may be using to send information are HTTP, HTTPS, and they use the language of the internet, Hypertext Transport Protocol, or the secure version with the S right? So this TLS encrypted end-to-end. You should use HTTPS, especially if you have IoT devices, sending information all over the place. You have no idea, when you're going to accidentally collect information, that was maybe personally identifiable, or something of that nature. Or there is a few things that I've thought about making, or if you have a scale that is Wi-Fi connected, you can actually have a scale send their inform, I don't want people to know about my weight, or my heart rate, or anything like that. So I want to have that encrypted. So I'm going to use the HTTPS, to send those over to, usually an HTTP endpoint, that says, hey, well here's the information. Here's the JSON." A lot of times, not all the time, I'm going to now store that. And maybe that even out publishes to queue. So this can be used in conjunction. - So you've already, already pointed out that HTTPS. That's what we should be using. - Yep. - But why, why is there so many protocols? Why is there so many connections? I mean, would we need anything else besides HTTPS, or is that-- - You know Zach, honestly, no, not really. You could probably design an entire system through HTTPS. - Okay. - The problem is, is how you want the system behaves, is going to dictate the protocol, that you choose. So MQTT, Pub-Subscribe, it's a pub/sub model. So if I publish to a topic, anybody who's subscribed to the topic, is going to be told about it, right? - HTTP is more of a back and forth conversation. It's a request, response, request, response. - I remember that. - Request, response, because of how that behaves, notice that is, if I ask you a question, I expect an answer, and I'm always going to go through that loop. How am I ever going to inform anybody else about it? If I need that to occur, then I'm going to choose one of those other protocols, MQTT, because I don't need to have a conversation back and forth, like you and I are, - So you can broadcast it. - I need to broadcast it-- - Yeah. so I think of MQTT, is the megaphone, "Hey" versus, "Hey Zach, what are you doing this weekend?" And you're going to answer that question back and forth. So that's how I make a choice, because of those respective protocols. - Yeah - But you're right. We've talked about three. There's a whole bunch of them. Which one do I pick? Sometimes it's kind of just a toss up. Maybe it's the one you're most familiar with, but there are times, like HTTP, versus MQTT, where, well I could do a pub/sub with HTTP, but I'm actually going to have to build the subscribe, and the publish. So maybe the HTTP endpoint is for the publish. And then, well, how do I push out to everybody? I have to build a client, MQTT already works. It's established, so I'm going to pick that for that. - Right? - The conversation through the internet, I'm just going to go with HTTP Secure, HTTPS. - Yes. - Now all of these pieces, wire connections, wireless connections, protocols, they all come together, into, a more high level, just networking. I need to be able, Internet of Things, internet net, networking, it's in the name, - That's it. - Internet of Things, - There it says. right? I have to have all these pieces, to put these on the internet. And along with that, I just have the concepts of networking. Now I'm not going to dive in, and teach you everything there is to know about networking, but there are some high level terms, that you should be familiar with. And, you can learn them institute, so IP addressing, IPv4, IPv6. Typically I'm going to use IPv4, because I'm doing this on private networks. So I don't have to worry about clashes, but maybe you just love IPv6. And that's a challenge you want to do, give it a go, routing, and quality of service, especially with MQTT, MQTT handsome quality of service guarantees, correspondingly that has to do with, network, quality of service, and like, hey, is this going to be delivered? What priority does this have? So how does things get to where they're supposed to go? And what are the guarantees surrounding, how they're going to get there? - Ah. - Okay. Encryption, which we've already talked about, when in doubt, encrypt. Oh, should I encrypt? Yes. - Yes. - When do I encrypt, - [Zach] All the time. (Zach chuckles) - Zach's got, see, Zach's got it. And it makes me happy. I will tell you, it makes me happy knowing, that we've all developed a healthy dose of paranoia, working at it particularly. (Zach laughing) - That's so right. And then there's some newer things, like software-defined networking, that has come. - Yeah. - Right? Where I can develop these large network typologies, just using my computer. I don't have to physically plug in things, and that's good for simulations, but also it may be that your internal network, that's just what it does. It's software-defined. And then in some Encapsulation Bridging, these are manners of networking. And again, this is very, very high level, I'm not going to get deep on these. Just know at the very minimum, know those terms, really if I'm worried about, most things, IP addressing, 'cause you're going to need that to figure out, where are things on the network? And also encryption, - Right? - We're not going to die deeply on routing. Here, if you're worried about security though, routing, encryption, software-defined networking, and encapsulate. You're going to have to worry about all those, 'cause what you're ultimately going to do, is you're going to go all my IoT devices, are on their own network, - Right? - And I can't commingle them, with these other devices. In my personal home. I'm working on doing that right now, setting up a firewall. That's also going to serve as some of my management center. That's the only way in and out. And I'm going to set up, either virtual lands, or a physical local area network, that all of my IoT devices go on. In that way I don't have to worry about commingled traffic, kind of leaking over, into my computers. Are there ways around it? Absolutely. Is it foolproof? No. - Am I an amateur at it? And I may do things wrong? Absolutely. But the more you learn, the the better you're going to get. - Yes you do. - So, things to keep in mind. But Zach, I think that's a good place to hang out on networking. Very, very high level, know about those. I'm a firm believer, if you're building these small systems. Could you learn everything up front? Absolutely, be boring, wicked boring. (Zach laughing) So know that they're there. Know what tools are accessible to you, and then you go, well, I have an idea. I am going to set up a moisture sensor, in Zach's bathroom, to let him know if the conditions that are ideal for mold growth. Now, how am I going to do that? And then pick the tools appropriately. I'm not actually going to do that. 'Cause Zach, looks wicked uncomfortable right now. (Zach laughing) But I'm going to leave it there, Zach. - Thank you, Justin, great job. Yeah, I think I'm okay with the moisture conditions in my bathroom, but thanks again for that. And thank you for joining us with this CIoTP episode. Make sure you watch every single episode. You're going to be so glad you did, I'm Zach. - And I'm Justin. - And we will see you again very soon. - [Announcer] Thank you for watching, ITProTV.