Quote: Twenty years ago, my company is doing business in the field of traditional industrial test and measurement, the boss had a forward-looking to draw our bread, don’t go to Internet companies, too, since everything is the era of the Internet era, the company is doing these, later when you are on the way home air conditioning have regulated the temperature of the home, give you the microwave ready meals, By the time you get home, everything will be perfect. 20 years have passed, when the pie painting other companies have achieved, and the old company is still doing the traditional military testing measurement!

1. A rudimentary Internet of Things that was common 10 years ago

Because the company was doing industrial testing and measurement, it was already exposed to a lot of connected devices.

Children familiar with industrial testing and measurement should have heard of industrial Ethernet, LXI bus, wireless networking, serial port monitoring, etc.

At that time there have been many factories already have remote monitoring room temperature, remote monitoring and control equipment of the factory, even also done a nuclear project, each place is remote monitoring nuclear power plant of temperature, pressure, dio semaphore and so on the application of the networking at that time, of course, have a plenty of local area network (LAN), have a plenty of their components of the Intranet, A few are wANS-based.

The communication protocol used is more mature LXI, more partial door is serial port, 1553B, industrial Ethernet, etc., of course, there are also a small number of sensors are using Ethernet for data transmission.

2. Internet of Things

The idea of the Internet of Things first appeared in Bill Gates’ Book The Way Ahead, circa 1998, so it looks like my former boss might have read a similar book or article.

The rise of the Internet of Things, and even domain has become popular in recent years, the English word is Internet of Things, abbreviated:IoT. Because many predict that tens of billions of devices will soon be “connected” and trillions of dollars of economic value will soon be created, where the money is, technology will surely have to keep up.



The field of Internet of Things can be divided intoWith, cloud, side, tube, end, is used for upper application; Cloud is cloud platform; Edge is edge calculation; Communication control; An end is a terminal device.

3. Communication protocol

Due to the characteristics of the Internet of Things industry and equipment, its network environment is complicated, and the traditional Internet HTTP protocol is built in a stable network environment, so it is necessary to choose different communication modes and protocols according to different equipment and environment.

  • HTTP: old network communication protocol, is currently developing to HTTP3.0 protocol. Its main characteristics are to maintain the reliability of communication and to continuously extend its concurrency performance.

  • MQTT: lightweight proxy-based publish/subscribe messaging protocol. The essence of this is protocol-specific TCP communication, don’t think of it as complicated. Those who have done industrial test and measurement should use many communication protocols, such as CAN and 1553B, which are very complex protocols, while MQTT is very simple. For example, the following is a very simple definition.



    Strategically defy it, tactically take it seriously. Being so popular, it has many advantages.
  1. Use the publish/subscribe messaging pattern to provide one-to-many messaging and decouple applications.
  2. Message transmission that shields payload content.
  3. Use TCP/IP to provide network connectivity.
  4. There are three qualities of message publishing service:
  • “At most once”, message publishing is entirely dependent on the underlying TCP/IP network. Message loss or duplication occurs. This level can be used for environmental sensor data where the loss of a read record does not matter because a second send will follow shortly after.
  • “At least once” ensures that messages arrive, but message duplication may occur.
  • “Only once” ensures that the message arrives once. This level can be used in cases where duplicate or missing messages result in incorrect results in a billing system.
  1. Small transfer, very low overhead (fixed length header is 2 bytes), minimal protocol switching to reduce network traffic.
  2. Mechanisms for notifying interested parties of client outages using the Last Will and Testament features.
  • ZigBee: Is an emerging short-range wireless communication technology, low power consumption, compared with the current wifi Bluetooth power consumption; Short distance, in the case of no increase in power amplifier, generally between 10 to 100 meters; Low data transfer rate: 10KB/ s to 250KB/s. Can network. ZigBee is built on IEEE802.15.4 standard. Since IEEE802.15.4 standard only defines the physical layer protocol and MAC layer protocol, the ZigBee Alliance is established. The ZigBee Alliance standardizes the network layer protocol and API, and also develops the security layer. After the ZigBee alliance to IEEE 802.15.4 improvement, this really formed the ZigBee protocol stack (Zstack).



    A typical application system is as follows:

  • WiFi, Bluetooth, 3G, 4G, 5G these are more familiar, I will not elaborate one by one.
  • RabbitMQ, other MQ, since there are many advantages to the message-oriented middleware, of course you can choose the mature message-oriented middleware of the Internet.
  • Others, such as CoAP, are popular protocols to choose from depending on the scenario.

4. Various cloud platforms

At present, each leader has launched their own physical network cloud platform, with their specified operating system or SDK, it can be convenient to carry out the construction of integrated solutions, if not necessary, of course, choose their cloud platform is the best move.

However, due to the existence of data sensitivity, communication protocol standards, security awareness and other problems in various industries, many large companies are still spare no effort to manufacture wheels. Although these wheels are not as good as all kinds of cloud platforms, they can be customized at will, so many companies are still the first choice.

Of course, we still hope to have the support of the underlying operating system. As a standard, it will save a lot of effort for each company to build its own platform. In this field, Perhaps Huawei Hongmeng will be a good choice for everyone, but it is still too early to assert at present.

5, summary

In order to find a job, the need to improve the breadth of their knowledge, this article is just a feeling after reading, does not represent completely correct, there are wrong places, I hope you children shoes generous advice.

If you can see this, don’t go too fast, do me a favor, support my star! Yes, I vote. Thank you.