IoT describes a system where items in the physical world, and sensors within or attached to these items, are connected to the Internet via wireless and wired Internet connections. These sensors can use various types of local area connections such as RFID, NFC, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Zigbee. Sensors can also have wide area connectivity such as GSM, GPRS, 3G, and LTE. The physical objects that are being connected will possess one or more sensors. Each sensor will monitor a specific condition such as location, vibration, motion and temperature. In IoT, these sensors will connect to each other and to systems that can understand or present information from the sensor’s data feeds.

IoT data differs from traditional computing. The data can be small in size and frequent in transmission. The number of devices, or nodes, that are connecting to the network are also greater in IoT than in traditional PC computing. Machine-to-Machine communications and intelligence drawn from the devices and the network will allow businesses to automate certain basic tasks without depending on central or cloud based applications and services.These attributes present opportunities to collect a wide range of data but also provide challenges in terms of designing the appropriate data networking and security.