A technical overview of Cisco IoT: Routing and switching

The topical area of Cisco’s IoT (Internet of Things) offerings includes assorted types of wireless networking, and they consist of widely disparate requirements in different use cases such as “industrial networking.”

At recent partner training courses and presentations, Cisco summarized its product applications to various market niches. The following article offers a compiled summary of Cisco's IoT products, describing how they might be used and pinpointing why tech decision-makers should care about specific features.

WHY IOT?

First, it is an expanding area of networking, with increasing use cases. Secondly, it is impacting current organizations -- especially healthcare and retailing -- but touching anything where new forms of the sensor may provide valuable security or cost-saving benefits, or enable new capabilities (better inventory, better products, etc.).

This article covers a wide area of topics relating to IoT. Note that some of this might also be useful in non-industrial enterprises or other settings (e.g. building sensors, sensors embedded in APs, etc.).

To summarize: Cisco has a comprehensive and growing set of IoT products providing a single-vendor core approach while supporting standards for third-party product integration.

Perspective: IoT Skills, IoT Customers

In terms of talent and customers for IoT, there’s a spectrum of skills that roughly align with the use cases and sales scenarios.

The skill opportunities appear to range from “standard” enterprise networking supplemented with more IoT-specific products and design (“IoT Lite”), to “full” or “Max IoT” for industrial and other specialized networks. For example, outdoor networks typically have a large number of sensors and can be very different from most enterprise networks.

In case IoT looks like a large hard-to-digest lump: a person need not feel overwhelmed by this.

It’s like the rest of Cisco skills: start small, then expand your horizons as your capacity expands.

Sales professionals might need to focus on niche industry networks to discuss certain use cases and high-level designs in detail, summarizing work done for similar customers.

The hardest part of skillset acquisition is experience: familiarity with a typical farm or factory deployment, familiarity with some of the non-Cisco IoT devices that a given customer currently operates, etc. This may vary between sites or customers, so there may not be much to do in terms of advanced prep.

If your employer focuses on a niche (medical/hospital, farm, transportation, factory, etc.) that should be the focus. It’s also important to note that Cisco security, automation, and general networking products strategically complement the IoT space. There may be a mix of the two in some networks, particularly for IoT devices and IoT networks in offices, hospitals, or other indoor spaces. That might include building environmental sensors or extending to medical or other industry-specific monitoring and other platforms.

Within the IoT space, Cisco has industrial switching and routing products, typically providing hardened hardware for factory floors, outdoor, and other harsh settings or smaller spaces. Cisco also offers industrial Wi-Fi and sensor networking.

Cisco’s overall IoT management product is Cisco Cyber Vision, which provides visibility and establishes the security posture. 

Industrial Edge Computing

On the topic of connecting sensors and monitoring, the elimination of manual monitoring provides the incentive to invest in these products, consequently providing more insights, better data, and lower staffing costs.

Cisco supports LoRaWAN (a standard) for long-distance low data rates and reduced power consumption networking for sensors.

LoRaWAN uses an unlicensed spectrum and works at “long distances” of up to 15 km in rural areas.  It can connect thousands of devices (sensors) with low device power consumption and when battery-powered, has a lifetime span of around 10 years. 

Use cases: manufacturing, mining, smart cities, warehouses/logistics, parking lots, railway, utilities, ports, refineries.

Cisco’s Industrial Asset Vision (IAV) is a product intended to simplify and automate asset and facility monitoring while assisting with preventative maintenance planning. This works with Cisco industrial sensors and Cisco LoRaWAN gateways, providing a dashboard and mobile app. Sensors can also be added by QR codes or in bulk.

Cisco-branded sensors include:

• Outdoor temperature, indoor temperature
• Product temperature
• Refrigeration
• Door/window (open/closed)
• Water leak detection
• Light
• Occupancy
• Machine temperature
• Vibration
• Geolocation

Cisco also has an analog-to-digital bridge. It’s important to be mindful of the environmental requirements and details for indoor vs. outdoor sensors. Some Cisco devices have heating components that require power to cover their specified temperature range, so not only is it essential to routinely check temperature ratings, but also understand how they are achieved.

Cisco has an outdoor-rated LoRaWAN gateway, plus a similar LoRaWAN module for compact hardened industrial routers. The gateway takes LoRaWAN inputs and connects them back via IP over Ethernet.

Cisco Edge Intelligence software is intended to simplify the data flow from the network edge to multiple cloud environments (vendor clouds, etc.).

Conclusion

The ever-increasing ability to deploy inexpensive sensors and network them multiplies data-gathering capabilities. IoT and automation enable full-time monitoring of environmental and other data that was not previously possible. That’s a game-changer!

Thinking of the data streams as telemetry, the obvious and related next steps are AI monitoring, thresholds, correlation, and recommendations.

IoT remote instructions such as “the crop is getting dry, time to remotely turn on the water sprinkler in the south 40” or “monitor usage and conditions for EV charging stations for electric drivers” are also potentially applicable use for Cisco IoT data management. Put your imagination to work and learn how automated timely reactions might save major costs.

Another application consists of building a single secure transport network carrying both normal IT and IoT/IIoT/OT traffic, with compatible indoor and outdoor/hardened networking equipment, including routers, switches, and APs. APs are the hardened/outdoor devices for vendors lacking specialized routers and switches.

Is there any doubt we’ll see increasing use of this technology over time?

Image credit: Monticello / depositphotos

As a highly regarded technology expert, blogger, and BlueAlly architect, Peter Welcher has extensive experience, ranging from having had a role in coding the Cisco CLI, teaching various Cisco courses and other technical classes to having IT consulting positions with numerous organizations, from the financial, medical, insurance, university, government, and utility sectors. His focus has been on enterprise campus and data center technologies including route/switch, QOS, IP Multicast, and network management.