5 Ways To Solve IoT Scalability Challenges
The first few steps of developing an IoT application sound so amazing. It’s so fascinating for people that they forget the challenges that come with this. Sometimes their dream of getting their business off the ground with class IoT technologies stays dreams and the (PoC) becomes trash paper. Though there can be many technical or managemental issues behind it the most common problem is failing to measure the IoT scalability challenges and the investment of resources that needs to go with it.
Sure, even if you be ready to face all the challenges there is no guarantee that something will come and get you off-guard but this means you should always be ready to get surprises out of nowhere. As there is a vast difference between deploying an IoT system and managing it. As the number of connected devices grows the systems become more complex the old PoC fails to deliver the structure view that it used to give previously. So when the IoT scalability issues arise your all-new revolutionary idea fails to comply with reality, every business wants to grow and scale but when your business fails to overcome the obstacles how does it do this?
PoC may be helpful for giving all the scattered things a structure but it lacks the technical details by no means do we want to demotivate you, Instead, you should always be ready, you have to take account of all the issues that might happen or you might see in future while scaling. In order to do this, you have to think about what are those and be ready for them from day one. Here can be the issues you might face and how to solve them.
Use Sub GHz Radio Technology
You know that the IoT system will be completely wireless. The rapidly growing IoT industry demands the ability to easily connect exponentially growing numbers of endpoints to the system and this also should not affect the quality of the overall product or increase the price of the end product too much. It’s more important when your product is being been sold B2B and is used for commercial purposes. It’s one of the first IoT scalability challenges as your customers will be more into making profits and making their margins bigger. As your user base is increasing you will need your servers will get hit by loads of data as all the devices together will fight to get the data carried to the server.
How to win?
In order to overcome this scalability challenge, Here you can do something, measure the scalability of your IoT solution by calculating the number of daily messages each gateway can handle. It can give you a rough idea of how much it can be scaled. Currently, we have the sub-GHz radio technology that can send data over longer distances with less power consumption. This has a lesser frequency than 1 GHz. It is less congested than the traditional methods. In simpler terms, it separates IoT networks from other more congested frequencies. This can be a great way to overcome this IoT scalability issue.
Use Star Network Topology
When you just start out your business you won’t have a super sophisticated system as in the initial days you will have limited resources to put into your IoT development. Even the million dollars IoT platforms have limitations. There is no unlimited scalability of IoT. Renting IoT platforms from large companies like AWS, Microsoft or Google costs too much while scaling. We suggest you develop a custom IoT platform to connect more endpoints more easily. It’s true that will cost a little bit more than using saas but it’s affordable in the long run. There are SaaS for IoT platforms that claim to offer endless scalability, obviously, it’s not true.
With increasing numbers of endpoints, the gateway faces an immense load which hampers performance and brings many other scalability challenges to IoT systems. It also makes the layout of the network become more complex that also makes the configuration of the whole system much harder to manage.
How to deal with this IoT scalability challenge?
Not using a “Mesh Protocol” is the answer. It slightly resembles the parallel circuit connection of the electric circuit. The reason behind this is it has less range than others. You need to ensure your IoT devices are tactically distributed and an ample amount of repeaters are used for efficient transmission of the network. Adding moving nodes can further make network performance unpredictable. And troubleshooting is especially challenging due to the complex traffic flows. If you want your IoT at scale with minimum complications, star network topology will solve your problem of IoT scalability issue.
Standard-Based Wireless Protocol
Different devices in an IoT system are not always as same as others it’s another scalability challenge in IoT for example mobile network where every device a similar to a mobile phone. In an IoT device, every device is different than others. That’s why it’s called a mesh of heterogeneous components and technologies. This mashup of different kinds of technologies makes it hard to make devices compatible to easily interchange information with each other.
It happens because in the everchanging world of technology certain kinds of devices are going obsolete and being updated to a new one while other devices face a hard time compiling.
How to win here?
Modern applications today are capable of fostering horizontal interoperability by fueling global cross-vendor support through robust, transparent, and consistent technology specifications. For example, a standard-based wireless protocol allows you to benefit from a growing portfolio of off-the-shelf hardware across industry domains.
When it comes to vertical interoperability, versatile APIs and open messaging protocols act as the glue to connect the edge network with a multitude of value-deriving backend applications. Leveraging these open interfaces, you can also scale your IoT deployment across locations and seamlessly aggregate data across premises. This I show you overcome this IoT scalability Issue.
Automate Managing and Deploying
Manually deploying, managing, or maintaining devices is simply not enough to handle the rapidly growing network-driven IoT technology. Technologies today are getting spread across borders crossing limits and doing wonders if you are planning to travel to each place to manage those devices you are definitely doing something wrong. It’s one of the biggest IoT scalability challenges, in order to solve this Deploying and Managing must go together from the beginning. For example for our IoT powered weather station, we offer remote support.
This means you have to do something to be able to manage your far away devices remotely. There are various nuances and aspects that decide the optimal health, security, and connectivity of individual devices and the network.
How to win?
There should be a natively built software built into the IoT system which can automatically easily configure and update field devices from remote. For troubleshooting network and devices issues, you will need a comprehensive strategy and careful planning, you’ll need a powerful network and device management tool to better streamline and automate the management process to sort out this IoT scalability issue.
Take Hybrid Approach
Relying on the cloud too much can also bring IoT scalability issues but most companies do exactly that. Whether it’s collecting or processing data cloud is the get-go for most companies. There should be a combination of cloud and edge to strike the right balance between scale, cost, latency, and data privacy. With the proper balance of both your IoT system can get a proper optimum but you should also make sure that
The cloud is probably on the radar of almost every company that looks to collect and process massive IoT data streams. But that doesn’t necessarily mean you should transfer all processing work to the cloud. In many scenarios, a combination of cloud and edge/on-prem deployment is called into action to strike the right balance between scale, cost, latency, and data privacy. the connected system can support such hybrid workflows. Do this and your scalability challenges in IoT will get solved.
Conclusion
Whether you scale software or Application scaling it will come with IoT scalability challenges. Instead of thinking, they are impossible to solve like a true blue business owner you should find ways to tackle those problems and harness those opportunities. These 5 reasons are not all the problems that you might face but they are the most common ones. It was our small initiative to help you achieve your goals and avoid the IoT scalability challenges that most people suffer from. We hope you achieve your goals thank you for reading.
Have a great day.