IoT Application Data

The IoT has many protocols which transfer this data from the end devices to the cloud platforms and back again – including physical layer, link (or MAC) layer, network layer and transport layer protocols.

However, in this section, we are focusing specifically on the application layer protocols which sit above all of these and are designed to package the device data so that it can be processed by in the core network, and vice versa.

Once the data gets in to the core, it has to be stored, aggregated, analysed and passed to the application platform. This generally achieved by data brokers.

The diagram below shows some of the more common IoT protocols and data brokers and shows how they work together. As you can see, brokers generally natively support one or more of these protocols. They can of course all be made to interoperate, but in general one of the paths through the network below is used.

It is of course possible to implement a completely proprietary application layer protocol which would work just fine (and may even be more efficient and effective than the open standard protocols shown above). There is nothing necessarily wrong with this approach, it’s just not open and interoperable, so it’s less flexible from a customers point of view.