Five barriers to IoT adoption that remain in 2015

This could revolutionise our everyday lives as well as industrial and military implications, which is why the development of IoT devices is rapidly expanding across all areas of the electronics community - pushed by governments, corporate organisations, academic groups and hobbyists alike.

But despite this widespread commitment to IoT, there remain a number of complex challenges that the industry must overcome if universal adoption is to be achieved. These challenges vary between technical considerations over protocols and standards, through to less tangible concepts such as devices’ impact upon personal privacy.

Until the industry can sufficiently address these challenges, the concerns of the public will not be allayed, adoption of IoT will be held back, and the benefit that these devices can deliver will remain limited.

Here are five of the biggest challenges.

1. Concerns over privacy

As is the case with any new technology, the impact of IoT on individuals’ rights and personal privacy is a major concern that needs to be overcome if it is to see widespread adoption.

Fears - and not insignificant examples - of intrusive marketing and surveillance have helped to develop a sentiment of misunderstanding and mistrust towards the IoT from the public. To achieve general adoption it therefore falls to designers to ensure that personal privacy is guaranteed and protected.

From a design perspective, the best way to achieve this is to make sure that IoT products are genuinely delivering tangible value to people’s lives. By designing applications that are truly beneficial and not just novelty gimmicks, the IoT industry can provide end users with a trade off that genuinely works for them.

At the same time, the nature of the data-collected by IoT devices needs to be as transparent as possible - as do the controls and security measures that guard it.

A 2009 European Commission report, invited member states to provide guidance on the design and operation of connected objects. Recommendations included the need for IoT devices to be resilient to attack, use authenticated data, implement sensible access controls on the data collected, and offer a strong degree of client privacy.

Professional IoT designers and hobbyists must always take these in to account when developing a new connected device. If not, they face accusations of being lax towards user privacy.

2. Exhaustion of IPv4

Every device that connects to the internet requires an IP address, a numerical label that identifies it to other devices. Your computer has one, your phone has one, even your television may have one. As it stands, the vast majority of these IP addresses run on a fourth generation version of the Internet Protocol known as IPv4.

IPv4 is a 32-bit based system, thus it can offer a total of around 4.3 billion unique addresses. This seems a lot, but this figure was reached in February 2010 - and new devices are obviously being added to the internet each day.

Measures like NAT have gone some way to working as a stop gap measure, but network operators are increasingly promoting the adoption of IPv6 as a complete replacement. This new 128-bit protocol can offer up to 340 undecillion (340,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) device addresses, as well as enhanced security and network management benefits.

Despite the clear benefits of IPv6, a report from Google in December 2014 suggests that more than 94% of worldwide internet traffic still relies upon IPv4. If IoT technology is to succeed, IPv6 needs to be widely adopted as soon as is possible.

3. Supplying power

In order for the Internet of Things to reach its full potential, the various devices included on the network will need to become increasingly self-sustaining - not just in terms of communication but also supplying power.

After all, as the IoT expands to cover millions – if not billions – of embedded sensors, the idea of regularly changing the batteries in each device is not realistic. Instead, what is needed is for each individual sensor to generate electricity from its own environment, harnessing local elements such as vibrations, light and airflow.

For the most part, this is being achieved through the adoption of nanogenerator technologies. These flexible self-powered energy harvesters can be used to convert kinetic energy (created from vibrational and mechanical sources) into electrical power, removing the need of external circuits and batteries for electronic devices.

However, in spite of recent advancements in efficiency, there is still a long way to go before these solutions can truly supply sufficient energy to devices. As the world marches towards 50 billion connected devices, the need for flexible renewable power sources is going to become an increasingly common problem.

4. Lack of standardisation

While a lot of progress has been made towards a standard for IoT, far more is needed in terms of security, privacy and most importantly, architecture.

Recent reports have noted how an “intense battle” is developing between technology and telecoms groups for market domination of the Internet of Things. Whilst this is driving development in the space, it’s also increasingly fragmenting the market - not least of all thanks to the prevalence of proprietary standards.

As a result, several competing standards have emerged. The most high profile include the IIC (Industrial Internet Consortium), Google’s “Physical Web”, the Open Interconnected Consortium and “Thread”, a new IP-based wireless networking protocol that is seeing wide support from industry leaders like Freescale Semiconductor, Google, Samsung and ARM.

Until universal standards are agreed, IoT risks becoming yet another asynchronous technology sector that relies on ad-hoc governance by the big IT companies, with weaknesses that limit its popularity amongst the general public.

5. Selecting a protocol

As well as this - or perhaps because of this - design engineers face with an overwhelming variety of connection technologies they must include within any IoT device if it is to communicate with the maximum number of other devices it may encounter.

Some of the most popular protocols include WiFi, Bluetooth, Bluetooth low energy, ANT, ZigBee and RF4CE - but there are tens, if not hundreds, of smaller standards on the market.

The protocol selected will impact how the device can communicate with other objects and could ultimately limit its adoption within the Internet of Things, therefore is not something that is taken lightly. Highly specialised functions may only be available via proprietary solutions, immediately limiting the options open to the designer.

For example, WiFi currently dominates the world of wireless connectivity and could be seen as the obvious solution. However, it is an immensely power hungry protocol and may be unsuitable for portable Internet of Things applications that require low power consumption.

These are only a few of the issues IoT faces in 2015, but they all must be overcome if we are to see truly widespread adoption of the technology. Some of these obstacles require governments and industry bodies to address them, but many of them are already being faced head-on by designers and hobbyists.

For the design community, overcoming these obstacles is half the fun.