How does it work?

Since the 1970s, there have been a number of communications protocols that devices can use to “talk” to each other. The X10 protocol is quite common in house automation, AppleTalk was invented by Apple in the 1980s, SS7 is used for telecommunication systems, IPX was used in the early days of networking and SNA was used to connect many end points back to a centralised control system.

Designed for specific purposes, most of these communications protocols were either too inflexible or not sufficiently scalable to be broadly applied.

Internet protocol addresses are made up of numbers that were first adopted so computers that made up the early pre-cursors of the internet could find each other without going through a central point. As the addresses were sufficiently reliable and flexible, they spread to peripheral devices such as printers and scanners, then on to consumer devices such as cameras and phones.

As the size and scope of the internet and connected devices expanded, specific research and development projects sprung up around smart farming, automation and monitoring services, resulting in the ability to assign IP addresses to ever smaller devices.

Once a device is assigned an IP address, it can be accessed via the open internet, or via a closed communications system that uses internet protocols and can be embedded in hardware designed to send and receive simple messages, store and share information or perform a simple function such as turning equipment off or on.

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BRW

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