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16 The PCB Magazine • November 2015 tively. Groups such as Wireless HART, IETF, ISA and WINA have been hard at work helping to drive standards and ensure interoperability of these low-power wireless sensor networks, some of which can function on minute amounts of energy harvested from their environment (Fig- ure 5). These local networks will in turn inter- act with the Internet backbone through WiFi, GPRS, LTE and other existing infrastructure pro- tocols driving buildout of base station transceiv- ers and progress towards the adoption of higher data rate solutions like 5G which was developed under a NASA and M2Mi (Machine-to-Machine Intelligence Corp) cooperation beginning in 2008. 2) Data storage and networking in- frastructure: There are two approaches which will likely prove to be not exclusionary but rather complementary. "Fog computing" in which edge devices (our phones and the LTE network are a good example of this) do a sig- nificant amount of computation on board and only send resultant data back to centralized data centers. The other side is cloud comput- ing, whereby all the data (much of it raw and unprocessed) will travel over the Internet back- bone to data centers where it will be stored and analyzed. The question as to how much of each will handle what types of data is the subject of frequent debate. The drawback to fog comput- ing centers on accuracy, security and interop- erability. In contrast, the cloud computing side will suffer from latency, expensive infrastruc- ture and an absurd number of startups that struggle to articulate what their actual product is. Regardless of the protocols or the division between Fog and Cloud, a significant increase in back-end data storage and network speed is a foregone conclusion. As a result, IEEE has re- leased its 802.3bj standard which provides for 100 Gb/s data rates in four parallel channels of 25 Gb/s, and has been working on the next gen- eration of 32 Gb/s channels, to be followed by 56 Gb/s and later 112 Gb/s. How much data are we talking about? As of 2015, Cisco believes that only about 1% of physical things or systems are connect- ed to the Internet. To get an idea of how much data we are talking about at the 2020 milestone, we will use the example of self-driving cars. The reason many self-driving cars are built using SUVs or station wagons is to hold a significant amount of computing capacity to process all the data which the network of GPS, Lidar, cam- eras and radar sensors inputs. The Continental self-driving car prototype operates a 24-com- puter linux cluster in the trunk to process this data. IWPC (the wireless industry consortium) calculates that communication needs for these vehicles currently exceeds the data capacity of 10 MB/s Ethernet. This means a typical drive from San Francisco to Los Angeles, which is 420 miles, would create (conservatively) about 45 GB of stored data. Consider an estimated 1.2 billion cars on the road globally and 84 million new cars which were sold in 2014 and then each of those driving an average of about 19,000 miles per year, the amount of generated data is simply astronomical. How will all the data be handled? There is no doubt that these speeds are challenging nearly every aspect of traditional PCB construction and materials. A significant Figure 5: Dust networks' eterna™ 802.15.4 Soc system that communicated wirelessly and can be powered by harvested energy. puTTing iT All TogeTher WHAT IS THe InTerneT oF THInGS AnD WHy SHoULD IT MATTer To US?