This article is a translation of the German IOTA Beginner’s Guide by .
Use Cases
Birdz & Ledger: Water Sensors – Ledger
Sensor networks – Senses of the future
The collection of sensor data is the basis for automatic economy of the future. All control systems must receive information about the current status in order to be able to react accordingly.
By means of distributed wireless sensors, measurements can be taken in entire areas such as a city district. These individual measuring points collect information such as temperature, humidity, light, gas concentrations, vibrations, etc., in addition to traditional sensors such as sensors for opening and closing doors or windows and simple motion detectors.
Applications of such sensor networks are mainly in the field of security, industrial manufacturing, supply chain but also in buildings of the future or the large subsystems of a smart city such as energy, mobility, logistics and waste disposal.
Currently, most sensor networks are wired, centralized and easy to attack. For example, surveillance cameras have to feed their data to the central office for analysis. This is precisely where a major disadvantage of this so-called star network lies. Each end device must connect directly to the central master device. The effort required to create such an infrastructure is expensive and is therefore only implemented for the most important tasks, such as video surveillance of sensitive areas.
The vision of a wireless sensor network in the future is to become a kind of sense organ of buildings, industrial plants and cities and to collect as much data as possible for this purpose. In order to be able to store the collected data automatically, tamper-proof, convenient, resource-saving and decentralized in the future, a large number of automated processes are necessary.
IOTA’s technology will provide a communication protocol for the requirement of such wireless sensor networks in the future. In particular, the development of IOTA Streams seems tailor-made for this endeavor. IOTA Streams allows sensors and other devices to encrypt entire data streams and securely tangle them. Only authorized individuals can read and reconstruct these data streams. Building on this, a “pay-per-use” model is conceivable: Any interested party could buy the current crypto-key of a sensor via IOTA token and only then read its sensor data.
One advantage of such a network is that the nodes or the individual sensors (clients) with the associated radio transmission, organize themselves and pass on the collected sensor data via Gossip Protocol and anchor it in the Tangle in a tamper-proof manner. Another advantage of such a redundant network structure is that additional nodes or sensors can easily be integrated at low cost.
Furthermore, LoRaWAN will play a major role in future battery-powered sensor networks. As already described in the chapter on fundamentals, the IOTA protocol can be executed in the LoRaWan network.
Original source
https://iota-einsteiger-guide.de/sensornetze.html
Last Updated on 16. February 2021