ChApTEr 3 ■ how IoT DATA Is sTorED
Distributed IOT
IOT solutions can be designed and assembled in many ways. Some solutions use a single component design
housing all the hardware in a single box. While this design philosophy seems to be common for early IOT
solutions, there is another design philosophy that enables more versatility, expandability, and features than
a single hardware solution can provide.
This philosophy is borrowed (somewhat) from sensor networks where the solution is composed of
multiple, distributed components. In a distributed solution, the components communicate with each other
using one or more network protocols. You saw this in the previous chapter where we discussed how data is
collected and passed among the nodes in the network.
In this section, we discuss a distributed IOT solution. These solutions are composed of one or more
data collectors with one or more sensors using a communication method or protocol to transmit the data.
As mentioned, the communication method can use a device such as a microcontroller (for example, an
Arduino), an embedded system, or even a small-footprint computer such as a Raspberry Pi.
Typically, the data collectors (called sensor nodes in sensor networks) are designed for unattended operation;
they’re sometimes installed on mobile objects or in locations where wired communication is impractical. In these
situations, data collectors can be designed to operate without being tethered to a power (run off a battery or solar
power) or communication source (using a wireless mechanism). The receivers of the data collectors can be nodes
that process the data and store the data (data aggregator node) or a single database server.
While you saw an overview of each of these types of nodes in Chapter 1 , this section presents more
details about how each node is used to form a network to gather, transmit, augment, and store data. As you
will see, I’ve divided some of the categories to further define the types of nodes.
Figure 3-1 shows how each type of node would be used in a fictional IOT solution. We will discuss each
in more detail in the following sections.
Figure 3-1. IOT distributed network nodes