What Is Network Redundancy?

 

In common usage, “redundancy” isn’t necessarily a very good factor. It manner something isn’t wished. But in engineering, redundancy is essential—a redundant aspect or feature serves as a backup in case something important fails, so the system can continue operating or quickly be restored.

Network redundancy is the precept of the usage of backup community assets to limit or save you downtime if there’s a power outage, hardware malfunction, human error, device failure, or cyber assault. It entails walking alternative instances of core community offerings and constructing reproduction network infrastructure.

Basically, network redundancy ensures there are a couple of pathways facts transmissions can take through your system. If one path fails or is unavailable, there’s constantly an opportunity course from one community entity to another.

With mobile networks, community redundancy also way being able to connect to a couple of Mobile Network Operators within the identical united states. Using the right generation, this redundancy enables your gadgets to hook up with the fine signal wherever you install.

The extra redundancy your community has, the much less risk community screw ups pose to your business enterprise and your services. Your community doesn’t rely on any person element or characteristic due to the fact there are other resources on replacement. If one piece goes down, it gets swapped—instead of carrying the entire network down with it. @ Read More lureblog  

Whether your business enterprise chooses to perform your personal community or use an IoT communication platform like emnify, it’s worth know-how how community redundancy works and what varieties of redundancies you’ll want to plot for.

In this guide, we’ll cover:

Why community redundancy is important in IoT

Geographic redundancy

Software redundancy

Network operator redundancy

Network redundancy fashions

The value of community redundancy

For starters, permit’s communicate approximately why network redundancy matters within the Internet of Things.

Why community redundancy is vital for the Internet of Things

For maximum organization corporations, a single hour of community downtime costs $300,000 or more. (A 2016 have a look at determined that a unmarried minute of unplanned downtime could value upwards of $17,000.) Every minuscule your services are offline, you’re losing hundreds of bucks, unfavorable your logo’s reputation, and frustrating your clients. In business-to-business applications, your outages can harm your clients’ sales and reputation as properly—because your downtime will become their downtime.

That’s why redundancy is an essential issue of the Internet of Things. If you have got a backup plan for every failure, you can maximize carrier availability and reduce the effect of network-associated issues.

Who’s accountable while your device loses connectivity?

Your product wishes an Internet connection to do what it was designed to do. And regardless of what reasons a community failure, the end-person likely isn’t going guilty the cellular service, a third-birthday celebration information center, or the manufacturer of a particular component. They’re going guilty you. Because your product isn’t working the manner it’s imagined to.

This is frequently also proper if your application relies on a defective community the patron affords. Sharing a WiFi connection with your customers’ different devices opens the door to extra IoT security risks, that's one of the motives cellular connectivity is so appealing in IoT. Cellular IoT also offers you extra electricity to ensure you may maintain a reliable Internet connection. You either want to heavily spend money on network infrastructure, or locate an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) company you can agree with to deliver the connectivity your customers need.

You can (and should) construct redundancy into your software, however you’ll additionally need to look for connectivity providers that layout with community redundancy in thoughts.

Geographic redundancy

Network infrastructure has to occupy bodily area. Data centers should stay someplace. For companies relying on in-residence infrastructure, this creates some demanding situations. @ Read More attractioner 

What happens while your facts middle loses electricity? Or if there’s a natural catastrophe that damages your system? Or there’s a cybersecurity risk? Putting all your assets in a single geographic place creates great hazard for potential network screw ups. It also can growth latency as you install further faraway from your information center (the network indicators ought to tour farther).

IaaS vendors and organization-degree corporations use availability zones to create geographic redundancy. Each availability quarter can incorporate more than one data centers, and the community sources may be shared across zones. They can use duplicate times of an availability zone to serve as a backup for any other. This guarantees that disasters, errors, screw ups, assaults, and other problems that arise in a single geographic region received’t create sizeable service disruptions.

If a facts middle or a whole availability region goes down, there’s continually a fallback in place in every other region, so your customers don’t even be aware the disruption.

Software redundancy

Individual community capabilities can fail, too. Software redundancy ensures that if a community provider encounters an error or is in any other case unavailable, there’s some other microservice in location which could perform the identical characteristic. Microservices are a key component of cloud local improvement, and they can reduce failure points within a community via ensuring that crucial functions constantly have a backup.

This redundancy also lets in software program and systems to get hold of updates without interrupting the services. You can update one microservice while every other handles its responsibilities, and if there are no problems, the up to date carrier can take over at the same time as the others obtain their updates.

Emnify’s cloud-native IoT conversation platform uses microservices to manipulate:

API

Signaling

Data processing

Virtual networks

Data Streamer

Policies

Analytics

Charging

Billing

Each of these core functions has more than one microservices simultaneously processing the facts, so if one fails, some other can take over with no interruption.

Network operator redundancy

With a conventional SIM card, your device can only connect with a particular community operator and the operators they have roaming agreements with. When you’re in your operator’s home united states of america, you may handiest connect with their network. That method every so often you need to tolerate a bad sign and disruptions in carrier. And whilst you roam, you’re always going to be caught paying roaming prices on the statistics you use.

Additionally, while you need to deploy in a rustic in which your provider doesn’t have roaming agreements (or authorities guidelines save you permanent roaming), you have to get a brand new settlement with another carrier, installation new SIMs, probably use new modems and components, and create more than one SKUs for the identical product.

But SIM playing cards designed for IoT can come up with more flexibility with redundant operators. Emnify’s M2M SIMs use Multi-IMSI generation to pick the network with the quality sign or lowest information fees. It’s like having a single agreement that gives you access to 5 domestic networks and five lists of roaming agreements. Our SIMs mechanically select the International Mobile Subscriber Distinctiveness (IMSI) you need to connect to the fine to be had community.

So think you have got SIM cards from a German operator, and you’re roaming within the US. Due to technical problems, your German language operator can’t join you to a US network, and your devices don’t have provider. With a Multi-IMSI SIM card, we are able to switch faraway from the defective domestic operator and choose a brand new profile that works where you are.

Network kind redundancy

If your tool is only well suited with NB-IoT networks or 5G networks, then it clearly gained’t have service in places that don’t have this coverage. 5G, as an example, is predominantly available in large metropolitan regions proper now. If you plan to set up in areas wherein companies don’t offer 5G coverage, your device requirements to be capable of connecting to other community types.

In many instances, companies use previous generations of mobile community technology as a fallback in regions wherein they don’t currently have greater superior insurance.

But your capability to depend upon this redundancy relies upon on your cell components, inclusive of your SIM cards and modems. Emnify’s SIM cards allow you to connect thru 2G, 3G, 4G, LTE-M, or NB-IoT primarily based on your use case. @ Read More blissinformation 

Telecommunications interconnection redundancy

Cellular carriers use 3 one-of-a-kind networks to interconnect their cellular networks:

IPX: Internet Protocol Exchange

GRX: General Packet Radio Service Exchange

SS7: Signaling System No. 7

While SS7 is used to manipulate the connect signaling tactics among networks - GRX/IPX is used when a statistics connection is established. GRX was secondhand for 2G/3G - now it is replaced / superior for all IP communique and referred to as IPX. 

Emnify makes use of a couple of carrier for SS7 and GRX/IPX to join to their roaming partners - so even in case on of the service services has a protection window or community blunders - the tool can nonetheless join over the opposite carrier service.

Network redundancy models

There’s a couple of way to construct a dependable connection. And meaning there’s a couple of way to construct in network redundancy. Here are a few approaches companies and IaaS vendors develop backup structures to create opportunity community paths and maintain their services on line.

Active/Active

Active/Active structure uses two times with the identical functionality and distributes the facts throughout those instances, constantly retaining kingdom information in sync. Any time an example of a network is disrupted, the gadget will routinely transfer them to every other instance of the network. @ Read More stylebeautyonline