Main components of any IoT system

Every IoT system consists of one or more of these components. They can all function independently
or on their own, hence some companies might only specialise in one of these components or they
might have the full system to create a turnkey solution for a use case.

These 4 components are always needed as a base in order to cater for any particular use case or
solve a certain problem.

Sensors / devices

In order to get actionable data, your first thing you will need are the sensors or devices that will be
responsible for gathering useful data. There are a host of devices available for every scenario you
can imagine or think of. Prices vary from super cheap to extremely expensive single use scientific
laboratory grade sensors.

From simple integrated temperature and humidity sensors to IoT sensors that will measure radiation
on a geiger counter and transmit that data back to your backend or server.

Various methods can be used to send the data to a backend system:

• NB-IoT
• LoRaWAN
• 5G
• Sigfox
• LTE
• CAT-M1

Communications / Connectivity

All the sensors described above will need to have some way of sending data back to the server

where it can be utilised and the most prolific methods currently are either sim based cellular

technologies or LoRaWAN. In all cases the data is forwarded by the device to some gateway

and then the gateway will forward that data to a host of different backend systems.

Data processing

Once the data is sent to the backend system, it will need to be deconstructed into its base
components for example temperature, humidity and battery power and then saved in some
sort of database where it can be used for further analysis and maybe even follow different
paths to other systems.

Visualisation, alerting and actions

Every IoT system will need some sort of visualisation tool or suite of tools to take the data that was

gathered and actually show it to the user in some sort of dashboard or maybe even allow a user to

set up alerting based on thresholds being set. For example a thermometer might go over 10%

while it is in a cold storage facility and this might mean that a generator or power grid has failed.

As the temperature rises a certain threshold will be met and the system will send an alert to the

facilities manager in order to ensure that someone will go take a look at the problem on the ground

physically. 

Other optional components that might facilitate or make solutions better are components such

as ML -Machine Learning or AI - Artificial Intelligence. then there are various really clever and

innovative ideas that people come up with that might make a particular use case have a better

return on investment due to the way the solution has been framed or implemented.

Here at IoTdc, we supply hardware as well as the rest of the components either through our

innovative NOA Data Service platform, which is great for ingesting data into your backend

system and then we also have external partners that can help roll out any IoT solution you

requre.

IoTdc - Taking the complexity of IoT

Written by johnkweber - Technical lead at IoTdc

John Weber

Technical Lead

+27 (0)79 861 0847

john@iotdc.co.za

www.iotdc.co.za

The Point Business Park, Unit B3, 7 Sterling Road, Samrand, Gauteng, South Africa, 0187