Now let’s take a deeper look inside this ecosystem of devices & as you all know every Internet enabled device does need a Software, so do the ‘things’ in ‘Internet of Things’. Consider a case where a new community of people is formed & they all originate from different regions; for them in order to communicate, it is essential that they follow some common language & maybe some rules of the community. Similarly, how do you think will these things (devices) communicate with each other without having some pre-defined protocol or rules? Here it becomes necessary to have a common platform that would be used for the devices to communicate, and yes that platform will eventually be the Operating system of the Internet of Things. Yes, the IoT too needs an OS!!
The IoT is still evolving and so is the ecosystem of hardware/software around it. In terms of software, there are quite a handful of operating systems that have come up, each with different features but somewhat similar underlying principles. The technology (or programming language) might differ, but after all these are electronic devices that would understand either 0 or 1. We shall shortly take a look at a few of these operating systems that are available, but before that let us think through some features that should be present in an OS for the IoT.
What kind of features do you think will be suitable for an OS that would be loaded on a device with minimal memory/hardware? Let us list them down –