Internet of Farm Things

Companies are competing to turn data into advice on how to farm better, and attracting investments from the likes of Google Ventures and Monsanto.

Keith Larrabee’s farm sits on 4,000 acres of California’s Sacramento Valley, between a coastal range of mountains to the west and the tall Sierra Nevadas to the east. It’s an area that traditionally gets much more rain than most of the drought-stricken state. Even so, Larrabee is always worried about the cost and availability of water for his orchards of walnuts and pecans and his 3,000 acres of rice.

Two years ago he began inserting probes five feet deep into the soil of his nut orchards to measure the water concentration foot by foot.

When Larrabee began using such sensors, he had to walk into the fields to read each one individually—a process so laborious that he sometimes did it just once a week. But now, every 15 minutes, readings from the 25 sensors are fed into a network of solar-powered information-gathering stations scattered through the orchard. One of the stations transmits that information to a main database via cell signal. Larrabee uses his smartphone or tablet to log on to see that data, which is available almost instantaneously. Using a software platform called PTC ThingWorx, he sees two color-coded gauges for each sensor—blue means too much water in a given location, red not enough. Combined with data from weather stations around the property, the information helps ­Larrabee decide when to irrigate, where to do so, and how much water to use, either to maximize growth or to avoid frost. “Everything we do, every time I turn a pump on, everything costs money,” he says. “If I can manage my irrigation to exactly what I need, I’m not running the risk of overdoing it. I’m managing the health of the orchard better. I would equate that to a longer life of that orchard, to better crops, better-quality products.”

On Tuesday, Farmers Business Network, a San Francisco company that sells advice to farmers based on data from the farm and public information like weather patterns, became the latest startup in this field to draw notice when it closed a round of venture capital funding that included Google Ventures, but the trend has been building for several years. Companies like Monsanto, tractor maker Deere, and technology giants IBM and Intel are among those already competing with a growing gang of Silicon Valley startups, all hoping for a proliferation of Keith Larrabees: farmers who will see data as an integral part of farming, as important as a reliable tractor or good seed.

A company called PTC makes a platform, pictured here, that displays relevant data for farmers.

A survey conducted last year by the American Farm Bureau Federation, a farm trade association, found that 39 percent of respondents in major corn- and wheat-growing states were using sensor-­driven technologies on their farms. “Farming is moving from being an act of intuitive decision making to an act of analytical decision making,” says David ­Friedberg, CEO of Climate Corporation, a data modeling firm that Monsanto bought for $930 million in 2013.

This shift has been made possible in the United States by the proliferation of wireless networks in farm regions and the popularity of smartphones that can deliver information to farmers working in the fields. Major tractor manufacturers have been including hundreds of inexpensive sensors on field equipment for a decade, making it possible to collect data like the topography of each field and the location and depth of each seed planted.

Drones and smaller satellites promise to continue the data generation by making it increasingly possible to capture frequent, high-quality images of small sections of field, at a far lower cost than traditional photography from a piloted plane.

This kind of information can be especially useful when combined with large data sets that government agencies have made available—largely free—in recent years. Among them: troves of historical soil surveys, weather data, and satellite imagery.

Because there are so many sensors, and every data point from a farm sensor has a place and time stamp, the volume of information being generated is enormous, creating a technical challenge for those trying to analyze it. The amount of data from one large farm might be counted in the hundreds of terabytes, according to IBM. Creating the infrastructure to handle that much data will be complicated, says Vin Sharma, a director in Intel’s big-data analytics unit.

If companies can create services that turn this abundance of data into money-saving advice, the effect could be crucial for farmers operating on tight margins—in the United States, corn-belt farmers on rented land cleared around $20 an acre in net profit last year. Combining information like localized weather forecasts with details about topography, water levels in the soil, and the seed that has been planted in a field, a company like Climate Corporation will advise farmers about how much fertilizer, an expensive item, to put on a field and when to do so.

But how good is the advice coming from the many companies angling to become the farmer’s data advisor? Respondents to the American Farm Bureau Federation survey reported that the technologies they are using have reduced their input costs—a category including fertilizer and seed—by 15 percent on average and increased their crop yield by 13 percent.

Still, many farmers remain skeptical. “I don’t think farmers will be excited about these [data-driven recommendations] until they see the payoff,” says Carl Dillon, an agricultural economist at the University of Kentucky.

Bouygues Telecom to launch LoRa network dedicated to IoT

French operator Bouygues Telecom has announced it will roll out one of the first implementations of LoRa low-power WAN technology, which is designed specifically to support IoT connectivity.

The LoRa alliance was first announced at CES at the start of this year and then formally unveiled at MWC 2015. The underlying technology was developed by French company Cycleo, which was acquired by US semiconductor company Semtech in 2012. The alliance is a bid to get a bunch of IoT players, including operators, to cooperate in order to implement the technology in the field.

The purpose of an IoT-specific wireless networking technology is primarily to be as low-power as possible. Many IoT implementations will be industrial, embedded use-cases where replacing power sources is expensive and impractical. LoRa claims this technology enables IoT device autonomy of up to ten years on a normal battery.

Bouygues has been trialling LoRa in Grenoble since 2013 and is ready for a nationwide rollout this summer, and expects 500 towns and cities to be covered by the end of the year. KPN, Swisscom, Belgacom and Fastnet are apparently all also in the process of deploying LoRa networks or carrying out large-scale trials.

“The Internet of Things is going to transform entire areas of our economy, said Olivier Roussat, Chairman and CEO of Bouygues Telecom. “Thanks to the expertise and the infrastructures of Bouygues Telecom, we will be able to quickly offer nationwide coverage with a high quality service.”

“The pilot scheme carried out with Bouygues Telecom is a world first that has enabled us to improve LoRa protocols further,” said Alain Dantec, SVP and GM of Semtech. “Its long-standing involvement in the development of our technology and its ceaseless work to improve it within the LoRa Alliance has made Bouygues Telecom one of the world’s leading experts in IoT technology.”

Here’s a list of IoT implementations LoRa reckons its technology is good for:

• Smart Cities (smart parking, building surveillance, sound monitoring, people detection, traffic management, street lighting management, domestic waste management, billboard displays, etc.)
• Smart Environment (fire detection, air pollution, snowfall measurement, avalanche prevention, flood and drought monitoring, earthquake detection, etc.)
• Smart Water (drinking water monitoring, chemical contamination detection, swimming pool monitoring, seawater pollution measurement, leak detection, tide monitoring, etc.)
• Smart metering/smart Grid (smart electricity/water/gas meters, measurement of liquid levels, monitoring of photovoltaic installations, water flow, calculation of stock in silos, etc.)
• Tracking (vehicles, bicycles, objects of value, animals, people)
• Safety and Rescue services (analysis of presence in dangerous/forbidden zones, presence of dangerous liquids, radiation levels, detection of explosive substances, etc.)
• Commerce (supply chain control, mobile payments, smart shopping, shelf stock rotation)
• Logistics (monitoring of transport conditions, parcel localisation; detection of stock incompatibility, fleet traceability, etc.)
• Industrial monitoring (monitoring of machines/state of equipment, indoor air quality, temperature control, ozone level detection, localisation of equipment/products indoors, vehicle servicing, etc.)
• Smart Agriculture (monitoring of greenhouses and vineyards, golf course irrigation management, weather stations, compost, animal tracking, etc.)
• Smart Livestock Care (traceability of pasture feeding, monitoring of toxic gas levels, animal progress monitoring, hydroponic farming, etc.)
• Smart Buildings & Homes (water and electricity consumption, remote control, intruder detection, smoke detection, surveillance of valuables, etc.)
• eHealth (fall detection, medicine storage, sporting performance monitoring, patient monitoring, ultraviolet radiation, etc.)

Future of the Network Documentary

Part 1 - M2M and the Internet of Things: Brace for Impact

Part 2 - Broadband Capacity: Are We Ready?

Part 3 - Uncovering Software-Defined Networking

Part 4 - The Cloud: Building in Mid-Air

Part 5 - The Value Chain: Building Value in the Chain

Capillary networks – a smart way to get things connected

A capillary network is a local network that uses short-range radio-access technologies to provide local connectivity to things and devices. By leveraging the key capabilities of cellular networks – ubiquity, integrated security, network management and advanced backhaul connectivity – capillary networks will become a key enabler of the Networked Society.

Signs of the Networked Society are everywhere: remote monitoring of forests, connected cargo and isolated schools connected via broadband. People and businesses are relying more and more on connectivity to carry out their tasks.

Capillary networks use short-range radio to provide local connectivity connecting to the global communication infrastructure through a capillary gateway. Capillary networks are a smart way to connect the billions of things and devices that need connectivity, but some new functionality will be needed.

So what sort of applications can a capillary network support? A capillary network might, for example, connect a group of building sensors that provide relevant information to real-estate management. Or, a capillary network might connect goods in transit to a monitoring application.

Whatever the application, capillary networks work off entirely different sets of requirements compared with existing communication systems – which have primarily been built to allow people and systems to communicate. The use cases for machine-type communication (MTC) vary greatly from one application to the next and so rather than building systems with a one-size-fits-all approach, capillary networks will be designed to fit the application.

For example, keeping communication to a minimum is a key design parameter that allows battery-operated devices to sleep for as long as possible. The data rate requirements for MTC are often quite low – devices tend to report small amounts of information on say a daily or an hourly basis. And due to the billions of devices that require connectivity the cost of connectivity needs to be very low.

This article gives an overview of the functionality that is needed to deploy and connect capillary networks, why automatic configuration in a world where billions of devices need to be provisioned is a significant factor, and how to provide connectivity end-to-end securely.

The ABCs of the Internet of Things

These frequently asked questions help explain it all

You've heard the term and probably read stories about smart homes where the toaster talks to the smoke detector. But what makes it all connect? When will it become mainstream, and will it work? These frequently asked questions help explain it all.

What is the Internet of Things?

There is no agreed-upon definition, but there is a test for determining whether something is part of the IoT: Does one vendor's product work with another's? Does a door lock by one vendor communicate with a light switch by another vendor, and do you want the thermostat to be part of the conversation?

Here's the scenario: As you approach the front door of your house, a remote control built into your key unlocks the door. The door's wireless radio messages the network, which prompts the hall light to turn on. The house thermostat, which was lowered after you left for work, returns to a comfort zone. Everything is acting in concert, which brings us to the elegant definition of IoT by Paul Williamson, director of low power wireless for semiconductor maker CSR: "A true Internet of Things is coordination between multiple devices."

What makes the Internet of Things almost human?

In a word: Sensors. Many IoT devices have sensors that can register changes in temperature, light, pressure, sound and motion. They are your eyes and ears to what's going on the world. Before we talk about what they do, let's describe them. These sensors are part of a device category called a microelectromechanical system (MEMS) and are manufactured in much the same way microprocessors are manufactured, through a lithography process. These sensors can be paired with an application-specific integrated circuit or an ASIC. This is a circuit with a limited degree of programming capability and is hardwired to do something specific. It can also be paired with microprocessor and will likely be attached to a wireless radio for communications.

Can you give an example of how IoT sensors work?

Here's the scene: You are away on vacation and the house is empty. A moisture sensor detects water on the basement floor. That sensor finding is processed by an app, which has received another report from a temperature sensor that detects the flow of water in the main water pipe. (When water flows, it takes away heat and lowers the temperature).

That both sensors are detecting anomalies is cause for concern. A high rate of flowing water may signal a burst pipe, triggering an automated valve shutoff; a slight water flow might be a running toilet, and the water on the basement floor by routine leakage from a heavy rain. In either case, you get a machine-generated message describing the findings.

Here's how you investigate. Via a mobile app, you get two one-time codes to unlock your front door, one for your neighbor and another for a plumber. When the door is unlocked, a text alert tells you who entered. Having knowledge of the condition of your home may be a big driver of IoT adoption.

How will IoT sensors work in public spaces?

Take parking. Cities are embedding sensors in on-street parking spaces from a company called Streetline that can detect if a car is parked in one. Drivers looking for a parking space use the company's mobile app, which lets them know when a space becomes available. Streetline has also added sound level and surface temperature sensors to help cities determine the best times to apply salt and use noise sensors to ensure compliance with ordinances.

In the public arena, a smartphone can double as a sensor. In Boston, as people drive down a road, the phone's accelerometer sensor will keep track of bumps. An accelerometer can tell up from down, but more precisely it measures acceleration. All it took to turn a smartphone into a road condition monitoring tool, was an app that used its existing sensor in a new way.

Do you want your bathroom scale to talk to your refrigerator?

The IoT opens up a lot of opportunity for creative app writers. Let's start with a smart refrigerator. You buy your groceries online and have them delivered to your home. It has now become advantageous for grocers and food product makers to add RFID tags to their products. The refrigerator knows what is inside via weight-sensitive shelves and expiration dates. It can also help you keep a grocery list, automate orders and provide nutritional information.

For instance, let's say you decide to take a pint of Ben and Jerry's ice cream out of the freezer. When that happens, a connected wireless speaker announces, loudly: "Please reconsider this selection. As requested, here is your most recent weight and BMI." The wireless speaker is reporting data collected from your bathroom scale. The scale was never designed to communicate with a refrigerator, but an app writer made it so by linking data from the scale and fridge. This scale-fridge-speaker combination may seem silly, but here's the point: In the IoT, app writers now have the ability to connect seemingly disparate things to create new types of functionality.

How do IoT devices communicate?

An IoT device will have a radio that can send and receive wireless communications. IoT wireless protocols are designed to accomplish some basic services: Operate on low power, use low bandwidth and work on a mesh network. Some work on the 2.4 GHz band, which is also used by Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, and the sub-GHz range. The sub-GHz frequencies, including 868 and 915 MHz bands, may have the advantage of less interference.

Why is low power and low bandwidth important in IoT?

Some IoT devices will get power from electrical systems, but many, such as door locks and standalone sensors, will use batteries. These devices send and receive small amounts of information intermittently or periodically. Consequently, the battery life of an IoT device can range from 1.5 years to a decade, if the battery lasts that long. One IoT maker, Insteon, uses both radio and powerline communication, which can send data over existing electrical wiring as well as via a radio, which it says will offer an increased measure of reliability.

What is a mesh network?

Devices in a mesh network connect directly with one another, and pass signals like runners in a relay race. It is the opposite of a centralized network. The transmission range of an IoT device on a mesh network is anywhere from 30 feet to more than 300 feet.

Since mesh network devices can hand-off signals, they have an ability to connect thousands of sensors over a wide area, such as a city, and operate in concert. Mesh networks have the added ability of working around the failure of any individual device. Wireless mesh IoT protocols include the Z-Wave Alliance, the Zigbee Alliance, and Insteon, which also has an alliance of vendors. These protocols aren't directly interoperable, although there are workarounds via hubs (more on this later).

ZigBee is an open protocol, but its critics say that not all of its implementations are necessarily the same. ZigBee runs a certification to ensure standard deployments. Insteon and Z-Wave are proprietary, which may ensure standardization of implementation.

What's the best wireless network for the IoT?

Today, no wireless technology has a dominant market share in IoT applications. Nick Jones, an analyst at research firm Gartner, said more than 10 IoT wireless technologies will "get significant traction" in IoT applications. These wireless technologies include cellular, satellites and new communications such as Weightless, which uses "white space," or unoccupied TV channels. More importantly, no one wireless technology will meet every need and circumstance. A connected car, for instance, will use a cellular network to contact your home network.

Will I need a gateway or hub in the IoT?

A gateway, bridge or hub provides a connection point between your home network and other devices. The hub works with your home router and provides communications to the machines, devices and sensors that are part of your IoT universe. You will want, by default, your Zigbee smart meter to communicate with your Z-Wave or Insteon thermostat. This will also be true for the washing machine that is connected to a smart metering system and starts a wash only when electric rates are at their lowest point. These connections will be established through hubs that support multiple wireless technologies.

SmartThings, for instance, makes a hub that supports both Zigbee and Z-Wave, as well as a platform to build connecting applications. Eventually, these wireless technologies may be included in home routers, set-top boxes from your cable companies, or even devices such as a Google Chromecast.

Won't Bluetooth win in the end?

Bluetooth Low Energy was originally aimed at wearable technology, not the broad IoT market. But in early 2014, CSR, a semiconductor maker, announced a mesh network for Bluetooth, meaning it could now connect to thousands of things.

Bluetooth's ubiquity in mobile devices means that a Bluetooth mesh network as a broad IoT platform will have some advantages. Because Bluetooth is already a feature on smartphones, a smartphone could act as a management hub inside a home. But it's not perfect. A hub will be needed if someone wants to connect with the home network remotely, such as from work.

Do the big consumer product vendors really want an Internet of Things?

Skeptics say it's unlikely that all the big vendors will embrace open standards. A more likely outcome for the IoT are technological islands defined by proprietary data interchanges.

Without open standards or open communication protocols, devices on the network won't be able to share data and work in concert. Will Apple develop products that can connect with Samsung products? Will Bosch products communicate with those from Samsung or Sears? Maybe not.

Consumers will be frustrated and will be told that they need to buy into a particular vendor's product partner network to get a full IoT experience.

Can open source force the big vendors to play nice?

Open source advocates are hoping they can avert a fracturing of the IoT. The Linux Foundation, a nonprofit consortium, created the AllSeen Aliance and released a code stack in late 2013 that can be used by any electronics or appliance maker to connect to another product. The alliance hopes that the sheer weight of adoption of this stack, called AllJoyn, will help to push the IoT toward open standards. AllJoyn is agnostic about wireless protocols, and support for Bluetooth LE, ZigBee and Z-Wave can be added easily by the community.

Will the IoT destroy what little privacy you have left?

Privacy advocates are plenty worried about the IoT's impact on consumers. Part of this is due to the arrival of IPv6 addresses, the next generation Internet protocol. It replaces IPv4, which assigned 32-bit addresses, with a total limit of 4.3 billion; IPv6 is 128-bit, and allows for 340 trillion trillion trillion addresses or 340,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. This makes it possible to assign a unique identifier to anything that's part of the IoT (although not everything needs to be IP addressable, such as light switches). This may enable deep insights into a home. Smart metering systems, for instance, will be able to track individual appliance use.

"Information about a power consumer's schedule can reveal intimate, personal details about their lives, such as their medical needs, interactions with others, and personal habits," warned the Electronic Privacy Information Center, in testimony in late 2013 at a Federal Trade Commission workshop. This is information that may be shared with third parties. At this same FTC workshop, another leading privacy group, the Center for Democracy and Technology, outlined its nightmare scenario.

Light sensors in a home can tell how often certain rooms are occupied, and temperature sensors may be able to tell when one bathes, exercises or leaves the house; microphones can easily pick up the content of conversations. The message is clear: Courts, regulators and lawmakers will be fighting over IoT privacy safeguards for years to come.

Will my smart washer attack me?

Security experts are worried that consumers won't be able to tell the difference between secure and insecure devices on their home network. It will be a threat to enterprise networks as well. These devices, many of which will be cheap and junky and made by who-knows-who overseas, may not have any security of their own.

Security researchers imagine problems, such as the connected toilet, demonstrated at a recent Black Hat conference, which flushed and closed its lid repeatedly. Hackers could create havoc by turning appliances and HVAC systems on and off. Baby monitors have been successfully taken over by outsiders. One advantage that IoT security may have is it's still in its early stages, and the security community has a chance to build IoT systems with a strong measure of protection. Cisco is fishing around for ideas. The company is running a contest (with a June 17 submission deadline) with $300,000 in prize money for ideas for securing the IoT.

When will the Internet of Things be ready for prime time?

Vendors will be sorting out the various protocols and technologies for years. Consumers are curious, perhaps, but sensors and hubs for the home aren't flying off the shelves. There are real IoT uses today, especially for home monitoring and security. For now, the big users of sensor networks and remote intelligence gathering are businesses and governments.

Governments are deploying sensors to alert them to failed street lights, leaks in water systems and full trash cans. Sensors will likely have a major role in traffic control, forest fire and landslide detection. Remote sensing is already mainstream in many industries, office buildings and in the energy supply.

It's the consumer applications that get the most attention because they involve almost every industry and platform: health systems, home energy use, hardware, home building, electronics and the entire category of wearables, including clothing. Even plumbers will have to be aware of the IoT because of connected shut-off valves. But no one is going to stand in line for the latest smart refrigerator. It isn't the next iPad. The IoT rollout will be slow and will occur over many years, as appliances are replaced and home electrical systems are upgraded with smart devices.

What's the worst case scenario?

That a true coordination between multiple devices never comes to pass. Vendors, initially, will build islands, closed IoT environments that only work with their products and those made by selected partners. Privacy protections may be treated loosely, with users forced to opt out if they don't want their home turned into a giant spy cam for marketers.

We haven't even mentioned things like Google Glass. Imagine a scenario where people agree to share live streams as part of a Neighborhood Block Watch. A surveillance state may arrive on a flood of good intentions. But the IoT has potential to make life more efficient, safer, healthier and environmentally friendly.

In particular, people who install solar energy systems and use net metering, essentially selling surplus energy back to the utility, will have powerful reasons to install aware and connected systems. But whether these systems can work together will depend on the willingness of vendors to make their products connectable. There is no vendor large enough to control the IoT, but there are vendors large enough to make a mess of it.

IOx: Cisco Creates A Networking OS To Help Manage IoT

Cisco has developed a hybrid router operating system to help control and manage the Internet of Things (IoT) devices from Cisco edge routers and other networked devices. Cisco announced yesterday that it's IOx, an OS that combines the open source Linux OS and the Cisco IOS network OS, will allow customers to create and run applications directly on Cisco industrial networked devices.

According to Cisco's estimates, which the company considers to be conservative, there will be 50 billion connected devices by 2020 which will create even more data that will be expensive to move, store, analyze, and convert into useful content.

The challenge is managing both the devices and the huge amount of data that comes out of them, and doing so efficiently. Currently most monitoring, analysis, and decision making occurs from a central location. Data from a device is polled, transmitted, received, and verified; and if certain parameters are exceeded, the system doing the monitoring responds by sending instructions back to the device, with additional transmissions occurring for confirmation of receipt of instructions, escalations, and other actions.

Cisco's Fog computing concept works under the idea that some of that monitoring, analysis, and response can occur more efficiently, and with less cost, at the networks' edge; closer to the devices being monitored. Cisco Fog, which the company describes as a cloud that is closer to the ground, is a distributed computing infrastructure for applications. It allows network devices such as hardened routers, switches, and IP video cameras to manage the huge amount of data expected to be generated by people and devices in the Internet of Everything (IoE).

Since most monitoring involves checking to make sure that data is within normal limits, a local networked router could be programmed to analyze data being collected from IoT devices and only act on data that falls outside of normal parameters. By keeping the processing and the data local, latency issues would be reduced which would result in faster response times in the event some action were required. Additionally, data that did not need to be sent for analysis, or that had no value, could be discovered and discarded locally, thereby reducing some unnecessary traffic over the internet.

Some real world example applications given by Cisco for their Fog computing strategy include:

• Video cameras that can sense an approaching ambulance's flashing lights could change traffic lights to allow the emergency vehicle to pass through.
• Energy load balancing that would switch to alternative energy sources based on energy demand and lowest prices.
• Life saving air quality monitoring in mines that would automatically change airflow if conditions became dangerous to miners.

Recognizing that it would be impossible for Cisco to create and manage every possible application, the company is creating and supporting an open application environment to encourage developers to port existing applications and create new ones across various industries, including the manufacturing, utilities, and transportation sectors.

"Cisco is very excited to accelerate innovation in the Internet of Things by delivering IOx, which provides the ability to combine computation and communication on our ruggedized routers and other devices. We believe that this turns the network into the fourth platform for computing (in addition to PCs, mobile and cloud), which will unleash new applications in manufacturing, transportation, smart cities and many other industries," says Guido Jouret, general manager of Internet of Things Business Group at Cisco.

The Cisco IOx is expected to be available in Cisco industrial routers this spring.