Beyond IoT: Building Decentralized, Intelligent Infrastructure

#News(Startup) [ via IoTForIndiaGroup ]

[Editors Note See also  Vinod Koshla :The Intersection of IoT and Blockchain 
and Helium’s big innovation may be decentralizing certification ]

The internet of things was always about networks, where connected objects could be tracked and activated across wide geographic areas, supply chains, health systems and other contexts representing trillions of dollars of economic value.

Rather than IoT, perhaps we should start using the expression “intelligent infrastructure” more frequently to describe those networks. With the parallel progress of machine learning at the edge, intelligent infrastructure will enable software-based intelligence to permeate the physical world, enabling real-time optimization and orchestration of connected “things” (objects, vehicles, machines, buildings), at a system level. Uber, Lyft and others give us perhaps the closest approximation what such networks could look like at scale, except that, in an intelligent infrastructure paradigm, such communications would be machine-to-machine, with no human in the loop.

Building blocks: the connectivity issue
Connectivity, in particular, is a surprisingly unsolved problem. Certainly, technologies such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Ethernet, Zigbee and Z-wave are adequate for short-range connectivity. But for the kind of network scale required for intelligent infrastructure, it is very much early days.

Connecting things over a long distance is an arduous task that has very specific requirements: connectivity needs to be long-range, low-bandwidth, battery-efficient (as you won’t go around changing batteries in millions of connected objects) and cheap (many of those things will very small amounts of data, often quite infrequently).
Those are Low-Power WAN (LPWAN) wireless technologies, designed specifically to interconnect low-bandwidth, battery-powered devices with low bit rates over long ranges. In addition, over the last year or two, big carriers have jumped into the action, with two types of offering: Narrow-Band IoT (or NB-IoT, used by Deutsche Telekom, T-Mobile and Dish Networks) and LTE Cat M1 (Verizon and AT&T). And there is a lot of hope (and hype) around 5G for the most intense IoT use cases (such as autonomous cars), but it is years away at best, at least in the US.
A decentralized approach
Now, why would anyone want go through the effort of becoming a connectivity provider in the Helium network? This is where the Helium blockchain and Helium token come in.

Read More..