One difficulty designing IoT implementations is the large number of moving parts. Most IoT setups are built out of components from many different manufacturers – one company’s sensors here, another’s there, someone else handling the networking and someone else again making the backend.
To help you get a ballpark sense of what any given implementation will demand from your network, we’ve come up with a basic taxonomy for rating IoT endpoints. It’s got three main axes: delay tolerance, data throughput and processing power. Here is an explainer for each. (Terminology note: We’ll use “IoT setup” or “IoT implementation” to refer to the entirety of the IoT infrastructure being used by a given organization.)
Delay tolerance
Many IoT implementation don’t require the millisecond-scale delay tolerance that traditional enterprise networks can provide, so that opens up a lot of network-connectivity options and means that going for a lower-priced choice could prove very successful.
For example, a connected parking meter doesn’t need to report its status to the city more than once a minute or so (if that), so a delay-inducing wireless option like LoRaWAN might be perfectly acceptable. Some systems of that type even use standard cellular SMS services to send updates back to central hubs.
