
How do IoTs from multiple brands interact? - greenz1
An irrigation IoT system will require constant monitoring from soil moisture IoTs. These may be manufactured by different brands. How will these two interact? What will ensure that newer systems stay relevant when being used to communicate with older systems.<p>Similarly, self-driving vehicles and traffic control systems, or drones and air traffic management systems, or mobile devices and lights, etc. There are thousands of pairs we can create.<p>What is the current approach for interaction between different IoTs?
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iraldir
They often communicate through a central hub. If the hub is not supported
officially, some middleware (hardware or software) can be implemented to make
both device communicate in the same language.

Say I have an AC with just a remote control, and Alexa. They both don't know
how to communicate with each other

A hardware device allows to simulate the remote to communicate with the AC, it
thus become a connected AC. But that hardware still doesn't know how to
communicate via alexa, it just gives me a phone app and web hooks to control
the AC.

A software middleware then creates this connection, connecting to the webhook,
and registering itself as a device on Alexa.

Now, this is all very clumsy and tends to break easily. Make it harder to
maintain when you have like 10 devices with three middleware etc. But that's
the IOT tech debt we have to accept until everyone agrees on the same
interface, which might never come.

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greenz1
Yeah!! I was facing this very issue. The comment by @schappim discusses more
about this topic.

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schappim
This is why we have standards such as:

    
    
      - Infrastructure (ex: 6LowPAN, IPv4/IPv6, RPL)
      - Identification (ex: EPC, uCode, IPv6, URIs)
      - Comms / Transport (ex: Wifi, Bluetooth, LPWAN)
      - Discovery (ex: Physical Web, mDNS, DNS-SD)
      - Data Protocols (ex: MQTT, CoAP, AMQP, Websocket, Node)
      - Device Management (ex: TR-069, OMA-DM)
      - Semantic (ex: JSON-LD, Web Thing Model)
      - Multi-layer Frameworks (ex: Alljoyn, IoTivity, Weave, Homekit)

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greenz1
Looking into these things. Thanks for handing me a treasure chest

