WGU D337 - IoT - Full class keywords / guaranteed pass.

Sensor

Captures a physical phenomenon (temperature, motion, light) and outputs a signal.

Actuator

Converts a control signal into physical action (open valve, move motor).

Access network

First-hop connectivity between device/edge and the backhaul (BLE, Zigbee, Wi-Fi, LPWAN, cellular).

Gateway

Aggregates and translates device traffic; buffers and moves collected data to the central IoT platform.

Backhaul

Upstream WAN/cloud path carrying aggregated traffic from gateway/edge to core services.

IoT platform

Ingestion, identity, message brokering, device twin/state, stream processing/analytics, storage (TSDB/object).

Edge compute

Local processing near devices to cut latency/bandwidth and improve privacy before cloud upload.

WPAN

Short-range, low-power networks: BLE, Zigbee, Z-Wave.

WLAN

Wireless LAN (Wi-Fi); higher throughput, moderate power.

LPWAN

Long range, very low power, tiny payloads: LoRaWAN, Sigfox, NB-IoT, LTE-M.

Cellular (4G/5G)

Wide-area licensed mobility; supports eMBB, URLLC, mMTC in 5G.

BLE

Bluetooth Low Energy; short-range, low-power WPAN for sensors/wearables.

Zigbee

WPAN mesh for low-power sensors/actuators in home/industrial IoT.

LoRaWAN

LPWAN using LoRa PHY; very long range, low bitrate, unlicensed spectrum.

NB-IoT

3GPP LPWAN for massive low-power sensors on licensed spectrum.

LTE-M (Cat-M1)

3GPP LPWAN with mobility/voice and moderate throughput.

Satellite (IoT)

Backhaul or remote coverage where terrestrial networks are absent.

MQTT

Lightweight pub/sub over TCP with topics and QoS; great for constrained devices.

CoAP

REST-like protocol over UDP for constrained devices; confirmable messages; low overhead.

HTTP/REST

Ubiquitous request/response application protocol used for control/ingest APIs.

AMQP

Advanced Message Queuing Protocol; reliable messaging with queues and routing.

OPC-UA

Industrial interoperability protocol with rich data models and secure transport.

TLS

Transport Layer Security; encrypts/authenticates TCP connections (HTTPS, MQTT/TLS).

DTLS

Datagram TLS; TLS-like security for UDP (e.g., CoAP/DTLS).

mTLS

Mutual TLS; both client (device) and server authenticate with certificates.

Device identity/PKI

Per-device certificates/keys enabling secure onboarding and authentication.

Firmware signing

Cryptographic signing to ensure firmware integrity/authenticity.

Secure boot

Boot process verifies and runs only trusted, signed firmware.

OTA updates

Remote firmware/software updates to devices over the network.

OTA rollback

Revert to a known-good firmware when an update fails.

Network segmentation

Separate networks to limit blast radius and lateral movement.

Zero Trust

Verify explicitly, least privilege, assume breach.

Privacy: minimization

Collect/store only necessary personal data.

Privacy: consent

User permission to collect/process data for stated purposes.

Privacy: purpose limitation

Use data only for specified, explicit purposes.

Privacy: retention

Keep data no longer than necessary; define deletion schedules.

GDPR

EU data protection regulation with strong user rights and obligations.

CCPA/CPRA

California privacy laws: access, delete, opt-out of sale/sharing.

5G eMBB

Enhanced Mobile Broadband; high throughput (video/AR).

5G URLLC

Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communications; mission-critical control.

5G mMTC

Massive Machine Type Communications; very high device density, tiny payloads.

AMI

Advanced Metering Infrastructure; two-way utility↔customer metering system.

Smart meter

Endpoint meter measuring usage and communicating over AMI.

PMU

Phasor Measurement Unit; measures synchronized voltage/current phasors for grid monitoring.

RES

Renewable Energy Source; e.g., solar, wind.

DES

Distributed Energy Storage; small, grid-connected storage near the edge.

Prometheus

Open-source metrics TSDB with pull/scrape model and alerting (PromQL).

InfluxDB

High-ingest time-series database written in Go; line protocol ingestion.

Grafana

Visualization/dashboards and alerts over TSDBs like Prometheus/InfluxDB.

Digital twin

Virtual model of a physical asset/system for monitoring, simulation, control.

Device twin/shadow

Cloud-side JSON state representation of a device for sync when offline.

Telemetry

Device->cloud data (measurements, status).

Commands

Cloud->device control messages.

Five streaming ops

Compression; Dimensionality reduction; Summarization; Learning/Mining; Visualization.

SCADA

Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition; industrial control/monitoring systems.

Brownfield

Retrofit into existing systems.

Greenfield

New deployments from scratch.

Idempotency

Retrying an operation yields the same effect; prevents duplicates.

Dead-letter queue (DLQ)

Holds messages that repeatedly fail processing for later analysis.

Replay protection

Prevents re-use of captured messages (nonces/timestamps).

Rate limiting

Throttle requests to prevent abuse and protect services/devices.

Data locality

Keep/compute data near where it's produced to meet latency/regulatory needs.

Telemetry windowing

Aggregate stream data over time windows for summaries/alerts.

LIS (distractor)

Laboratory Information System; healthcare lab software—NOT IoT infrastructure.