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Community Blog Challenges for Internet of Things (IoT) Network

Challenges for Internet of Things (IoT) Network

In the advent of IoT technology, many enterprises may face some challenges. In this article, you will get some information on some challenges for IoT network.

In the development of IoT technology, many enterprises may face some challenges, like for IoT network. In this article, we will discuss about the challenges you may face for IoT network.

Connectivity

Connectivity is the first concerning issue, i.e., how to connect devices to the Internet and the cloud computing platform. However, to a great extent, this is determined by the device application environment and the type of communication infrastructure provided to these devices.

For example, if you need to develop a smart home device, such as an online toaster, you may access a Wi-Fi home router or a ZigBee/Z-Wave IoT router. Therefore, your device must support one or more transmission media. However, in some environments, such as the agriculture IoT or smart cars, access to the Wi-Fi network is unavailable, and the mobile network may be your only choice for connection.

Therefore, you must balance your choice and make design decisions based on possibilities provided by every option and investments. For example, it may be expensive to transmit data through a cellular network to the cloud service, but you may determine to select the function first mode or the blockchain mode to build an IoT ecosystem that is less dependent on cloud computing.

Security and Privacy

IoT security has always been a controversial issue. The first challenge to be considered is that security and privacy of IoT are fundamentally different from network security that we've known. The following lists some key points for security design that are considerable:

  1. Physical Security: IoT devices are often located in open fields, and are unattended and not physically protected. You must ensure that they will not be maliciously tampered with by vicious organization, breached by hackers, or operated using a flat-head screwdriver. Also, you must protect data that gets stored on the devices in any form. Although it is costly to embed a security protection component on every IoT device, it is still important to encrypt data on these devices.
  2. Security of Data Exchange: Data protection is also important because data must get transmitted from the IoT sensors and devices to the gateway, and then to the cloud. Therefore, use of encrypted transfer protocols is a must. In addition to encryption, you must also consider the authentication and authorization to ensure IoT security.
  3. Security of Cloud Storage: Data stored in the cloud is equally fragile as other parts of the IoT ecosystem. Your platform should be able to protect data stored in the cloud. Protection measures include appropriate encryption, access control, and so on.
  4. Update: Security vulnerabilities always exist no matter how much efforts you pay to enhance your product code and hardware. In this case, you must first have a plan to fix errors and quickly release patches, instead of leaving the errors unfixed for a long period. Next, you must provide customers with a direct and secure method to fix errors. Currently, it is popular to update online devices over the air, but you must ensure that the above method itself will not become a security vulnerability.

For more information about the challenges you may met for IoT devices, you go to Four Challenges to be Considered When Developing IoT Devices.

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