Internet of Things, Challenges for Demand Side Management

The adoption of any new product means also the apparition of new issues and challenges, and this is especially true when we talk about a mass adoption. The advent of Internet of Things (IoT) devices will be, in the authors of this paper opinion, the largest and the fastest product adoption yet to be seen, as several early sources were predicting a volume of 50 billion IoT devices to be active by 2020 [1][2]. While later forecasts reduced the predicted amount to about 20-30 billion devices [3], even for such “reduced” number, demand side management issues are foreseeable, for the potential economic impact of IoT applications in 2025 will be between 3.9 and $11.1 trillion USD [4]. Not only that new patterns will emerge in energy consumption and Internet traffic, but we predict that the sheer amount of data produced by this quantity of IoT devices will give birth to a new sort of demand side management, the demand side management of IoT data. How will this work is yet to be seen but, at the current moment, one can at least identify the bits and pieces that will constitute it. This paper is intended to serve as short guide regarding the possible challenges raised by the adoption of IoT devices. The data types and structures, lifecycle and patterns will be briefly discussed throughout the following article.