Tech Briefs Magazine - June 2021 - ST-11

TECHNOLOGY LEADERS Sensors
Forecasting the Future: It's Bright for
Sensors.
The sensors that engineers envision
today will evolve to help create new and
refined ideas for future applications. As
we've seen, the once futuristic technologies
like artificial intelligence (AI)
and the spectrum of realities - virtual,
augmented, and mixed - are entering
the mainstream in many facets of our
work and personal lives.
Figure 3. Valuable data-driven decisions come from an end-to-end remote monitoring platform - from sensor to
gateway to cloud. (Photo courtesy of Monnit Corporation)
quency systems, and electromagnetic
interference (EMI).
A sensor's physical robustness is critical.
Is it flexible enough to be placed in
multiple environments, handle many
different industrial applications, manage
a wide variety of complications, and
still gather, store, and send you the critical
data you need? Plus, a robust sensor
provides the least expensive and best
kind of insurance - prevention. Sensors
can help prevent problems like facility
and product damage or asset downtime.
They allow you to detect when a system
or machine is starting to fail and the
problem is still inexpensive to address.
Keep Sensor Data Safe By Eliminating
Risk
Are your sensors unhackable? Sensor
systems that include encryption functions
using the Diffie-Hellman key exchange
algorithm and 128-bit Advanced
Encryption Standard (AES-128) Cipher
Block Chaining (CBC) symmetric key
encryption can protect transmitted data
from breaches. And to protect web servers
and browsers connected to a sensor network,
you can use Transport Layer
Security (TLS) encryption.
On top of these data encryption standards,
sensors need an added security
layer. For complete security, you can add
an authentication layer for more protection
during data generation and all the
way to its consumption with 256-bit
Secure Hash Algorithm 3 (SHA-3).
The 256-bit SHA-3 authentication can
safeguard your sensor data with a unique
global key or fingerprint. This data
authentication includes source-generatSensor
Technology, June 2021
Cov
ed data verification at the software or
application layer. So, when the sensor
sends data, its companion is an automatically
generated authentication token.
And when software receives the data, the
token gets analyzed through a cryptographic
hash function with a custom sensor
secret key. This way, security is sustained
at all communication points, for
example, between sensor, gateway, network,
network controller, and the cloud.
Ultimately, these encryption and
authentication layers combine to create
a strong sensor security platform. If your
sensors are all locked up within an endto-end
IoT data security platform like
this - all the better.
The Boom Of Sensors Is a Boon to
Data-Driven Decisions
With the increasing growth of sensors
turning into billions of connected devices,
companies could easily get overwhelmed
with billions if not more data points.
Whether your sensors transmit data only
periodically when parameters change or
in real-time streams for processing in a
data center, the cloud, or at your network's
edge, you need a versatile software
platform to make sense of the potentially
unprecedented amount of data.
The main benefits of sensors come
not only in their data gathering capabilities
but also in their activation of agile
data analysis. The combination of sensor
management, data aggregation and storage,
and alerts into one cloud-based or
on-premises platform with customizable
APIs for analytics software integration
can be the key to making fast data-driven
decisions.
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ToC
Sensors play a pivotal part in the
applications of these advancements.
And sensors will help feed the near
future's ultra-fast data processing and
analytics fueled by 5G, AI, computer
vision, sensor fusion, and multi-access
edge computing. It's easy to predict
that sensors will keep evolving for use
in as yet unthought of applications
because of these innovations and the
growth of everything from smart cities
to smart factories to smart cars.
* Flexible plug and play sensors will set
new form and function standards
even beyond a combination sensor
that just measures two parameters,
for example, soil moisture and temperature.
*
Innovations will come as we continue
to sense many conditions with one versatile
sensor system for many remote
monitoring solutions.
* Industrial control automation powered
by sensors and AI will continue to
create innovative opportunities to
advance manufacturing processes.
* Satellite communications and GPS
advancements will combine to
improve how sensors monitor assets in
ultra-remote locations.
* Sensor energy sourcing will improve
with battery advancements and selfpowered
or energy harvesting options.
* As sensors go on to be more fully integrated
into wireless networks and
replace hardware configurations, we'll
see reductions in costs and power consumption.
You
can count on sensors to continually
transform this Industry 4.0 era and
beyond.
This article was written by Brad Walters,
Founder and CEO of Monnit. For more information
go to https://www.monnit.com/
applications/ or contact Mr. Walters at
info@monnit.com
or visit http://info.
hotims.com/79414-163.
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Tech Briefs Magazine - June 2021

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