Big Data, Internet of Things: The Network ImpactBig Data, Internet of Things: The Network Impact

Service provider and enterprise networks have to be redesigned to carry the explosion of IoT traffic. IT staff will become masters of a whole new range of endpoints.

You are dealing with big data, more traffic on your IP network, and new endpoint devices. The Internet of Things (IoT) will make all of these issues worse. IoT will generate masses of new data. Even though you expect the new endpoints will be wireless, there will still be a growth of wired endpoints as well.

Fleet vehicles, company cars, construction equipment, appliances, medical devices, TV sets and set top boxes, game consoles, utility meters, and even watches may all be on your network. The number of connected devices could reach the tens of billions worldwide by the end of this decade.

"Sensing as a Service and Big Data," by Arkady Zaslavsky, Charith Perera, and Dimitrios Georgakopoulos, is a paper published by the Research School of Computer Science at The Australian National University. This paper provides some idea of the amount of big data stored in the U.S. in 2010--about 3,500 Petabytes. A petabyte is 1 million gigabytes. The U.S. data stored is equal to the big data storage for all the rest of the world combined.

The paper projects IoT object growth to 2015, and the figure below shows the IoT object growth categories. The figure reference states that the "Data generated from the Internet of Things will grow exponentially as the number of connected objects increases. The estimated numbers of connected objects based on different sectors are presented in millions."

The Big Data Challenge
IoT is about billions of physical objects and devices. These objects can be network-connected over short-range wireless, Wi-Fi and cellular networks, and also over wired networks. They may be connected to special sensor networks, and RFIDs may be the object.

One result will be that private enterprise IP networks will be inundated with new traffic. The volume of data and the traffic it will produce is moving into the zettabyte (ZB) range. A zettabyte is equal to 10 to the power of 21 bytes. This is a lot of storage as well as a lot of network capacity to carry it.

We already have a rapid growth of big data with social media and entertainment transmissions. The big data growth will be in unstructured data. This will require standardization by the vendors, manufacturers, service providers, and retailers who need to agree on a simple textual format for describing the data. In addition to these activities around big data, there may be efforts to create more efficient protocols to carry IoT data across networks.

Many in the industry are focusing on the storage and computer processing requirements--there will be a need to balance the costs of big data analysis and performance. We will need changes to how computers are designed. Multicore processors and changes in parallel processing will be needed.

In addition, fiber networks will continue to be expanded. The problem is that for every increase in available bandwidth, there seems to be data generation that quickly consumes the available bandwidth. Network transmission capacity and routers, switches, and interface cards need to keep up with the bandwidth demand.

Security and Privacy at Risk
Since a tremendous amount of data will be generated by IoT, who owns the data? Medical and financial information is already covered by regulations. But what could a manufacturer learn from our appliances, game consoles, even our cars? Will an insurance company raise our rates if it's able to learn from IoT data that we speed or go through a red light? Will the data from my car go to the car manufacturer, local law enforcement, my insurance company, and into court if I have an accident? Could the service providers collect information and sell it?

A second consideration is the ability to hack the IoT objects. The hacker could read the information, manipulate it to your disadvantage, steal the device identity, or change GPS coordinate information. This presents new security challenges to both the owner of the object as well as the collector of the data.

Impact on Networks and Providers
The wireless service providers will have to reconsider their data charge plans. Much of the traffic will be short messages delivered periodically rather than randomly. A utility company may want a special data plan for its cell-connected meter's network use. Will this produce a whole series of special pricing arrangements since the IoT object will not be a cell phone or tablet? What network QoS should be given to critical transmissions such as medical or emergency information?

Service providers will need much more bandwidth, both wired and wireless. The overhead for the short messages will be high because the messages themselves will be only tens of bytes long. The transmission overhead could be as high as 50% for IoT data.

The same bandwidth and QoS issues will be encountered by the enterprise within the private network. Will the enterprise network be scalable to carry the traffic growth? Routers are most efficient when they transfer data streams, not single-packet short messages. The routers and switches may need to have redesigned software to handle short messages that most likely will be carried in UDP rather than TCP packets. What is the financial value of collecting the IoT data? That is a business question that needs to be answered before private networks are expanded.

Another issue is the vastly increased number of IP addresses. IPv6 will be necessary to provide enough addresses. This will require expanded Domain Name Servers and the providers' and enterprise's accelerated movement to IPv6 to support the expanded addresses. Troubleshooting the IoT devoices will require new skills and new tools for those managing the objects.

Conclusions
The growth of IoT and the subsequent increase in data will affect the data center. What needs to be given more exposure is the modest amount of capacity currently available on both wired and wireless networks. Both service providers' and enterprises' networks have to be redesigned to carry the explosion of IoT traffic. The enterprise IT staff will become masters of a whole new range of endpoints.