Preface
In today’s Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem, Low-power Wide-area (LPWA) communication technologies play a central role in connecting the smart objects to the Internet due to their low complexity, low power consumption, wide coverage and high capacity. Cellular IoT technologies such as LTE-M and NB-IoT bring significant value for LPWA use cases over non-cellular communications due to their ubiquitous connectivity, technology maturity, scalability, reliability and security.
This book, first describes the simplified architecture of an IoT network from the core functional perspective, then presents step-by-step procedures to establish a connection between the IoT device and platform. It practically shows how to connect a cellular IoT module to the Microsoft Azure IoT Hub using the LTE-M technology.
Four experiments are designed to practice different concepts required to exchange the data between the IoT device and the software backend. In Chapter 2, the required hardware and AT commands to configure the LTE-M module are described. This chapter will also show how to send text messages and enable the GPS module to acquire the positioning information.
The purpose of Chapter 3 is to configure the LTE-M module as a TCP/IP client in order to establish a client-server connection with a server and exchange data.
After becoming familiar with various IoT application protocols in Chapter 4, the MQTT function lab will show how to configure the LTE-M module to act as a MQTT client/subscriber and exchange data with a broker. The broker will be built on a computer using Node-RED programming tool to wire together hardware devices, and online services to establish a communication with the LTE-M module. The data published on the broker will be sent to the MQTT clients that have subscribed to the topic.
Finally, Microsoft Azure IoT Hub is introduced which is a cloud managed service acting as a central message hub for two-way secure communication between the IoT application and the IoT device it manages. In Chapter 6, you will learn how to use the Node-RED flow to establish a connection between the Microsoft Azure IoT platform and the IoT device. Once the data is received by Microsoft Azure, different components can be utilized to visualize and analyze the data to create actionable insight.
