While IoT is usually considered to be wireless devices, sometimes it is common to connect IoT solutions using wires. In this chapter, we do not present communication protocols that are short distant one designed to connect sensors to IoT device, like I2C, SPI, Serial, etc. Those are described in chapter introduction_to_iot_communication_and_protocols.

Cooper based wired networks also bring an extra feature to the IoT designers - an ability to power the device via a wired connection, i.e. PoE (Power over Ethernet) - 802.3af, 802.3at, 802.3bt ¹⁾. Long distance connections may be implemented using optic-based, fibre connections, but those require physical medium converters that are usually quite complex, pretty expensive and power consuming thus they apply only to the niche IoT solutions. Please note, mentioned optical connections do not cover so-called LiFi, as those are considered to be wireless ²⁾.

A non exhaustive list of some present and former wired networking solutions are presented in the table 1: