IoT Application Scenarios and Solution Design
What the exam tests
Applying the stack to smart home, city, industry, agriculture, logistics, and energy; producing a defensible solution design.
Core rules
- Start from requirements: data rate, latency, power, mobility, environment, scale, and regulation.
- Select devices and connectivity together; then platform services, edge placement, and security.
- Common patterns: smart home uses Wi-Fi/BLE/ZigBee with a home gateway; smart city uses NB-IoT/LoRa with platform analytics; industry uses wired/industrial Ethernet plus edge; logistics uses cellular/BLE/RFID for tracking.
- Design for operations: onboarding, OTA, monitoring, and fault isolation.
Worked example
Design cold-chain monitoring for vaccine shipments. Requirements: 5-minute temperature, 2-year battery, nationwide coverage, alarm within 1 minute. Choose BLE sensors inside the box, a cellular gateway in the vehicle, and platform rules for threshold alarms. Reasoning: BLE saves sensor power; cellular gives wide coverage; the local gateway buffers when coverage drops; platform rules push alarms to operations. Add audit logs and signed OTA for compliance.
Traps
- Picking one connectivity for all scenarios; a campus sensor and a moving truck differ.
- Ignoring power budget and enclosure/antenna effects.
- Designing only the happy path; alarms and offline behavior are exam favorites.