IoT Standardization: It’s a War

“No, I want to be the one with the bat and the ball.” While developing products and solutions, the Internet of Stuff firms are racing over the creation of tech standards. Will the standards-based bodies and the industry leaders compete or collaborate?

Source: The Register

 

The IoT Landscape

Recent developments show that true IoT will become a reality. Numerous IoT products, including home automation devices, already exist on the market. However, many of them are incompatible with other devices or existing IoT platforms; many use only proprietary technologies (e.g., APIs and protocols). In addition there are multiple, complex IoT security challenges. The current IoT landscape lucks standardization.  There are no established standard to guide the design, implementation, deployment, maintenance and security of IoT. There are standards development effort, but they are too many and overlapping. In summary, here are the good and the bad points related to the current IoT landscape:                                                                                                                                   

• The Good:

•       IoT standards efforts –  including architectural and platform reference implementations

•       Numerous available products

•       Numerous potential benefits.

• The Bad:

•       Overlapping IoT standards efforts

•       Numerous incompatible devices with proprietary technologies

•       Multiple complex security challenges.

IoT Standardization Issues

The main IoT standardization issues are as follows:

•       Interoperability: radio access level, protocol level, semantic level

•       Security and privacy

•       Device and systems management: self-configuration, device discovery

•       Device/Object identity

•       Application deployment

•       Regulatory issues.

IoT Standardization

The main IoT standardization areas, devices, platforms, network, security, and APIs and their relations to hardware, software, and services, are presented in Table 1.

Table 1. IoT Standardization Areas.

Layer	Area	Devices	Platforms	Network	Security	APIs
Hardware	RFID, tags, etc.	X			X
	Processor, memory, etc.	X			X
	Radio, network, etc.	X	X	X	X	X
Software	Data Analytics		X			X
	System Integration		X	X	X	X
	Applications		X	X	X	X
Services	Industry Solutions		X	X	X	X
	Network Services		X	X	X	X
	Cloud Services		X	X	X	X

Figure 1. "No, I want to be the one with the bat and the ball."

IoT Standards Development

The main IoT standards development efforts are presented on Figure 2.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 2. IoT Standards Development.

• IIC – Industrial Internet Consortium (Managed by OMG) – formed by AT&T, Cisco, GE, IBM and Intel. ICC has three IoT related working groups: Technology, Testbeds, and Security – working on use cases, framework, and vocabulary. IIC is a membership group open to any business, organization or entity with an interest in accelerating the Industrial Internet.
• ITU-T – International Telecommunications Union, Telecommunication Standards Sector. ITU-T has the following related groups: JCA-IoT – Joint Coordination Activity on IoT; FG M2M – Focus Group on Machine-to-Machine Service layer; SG2 – Operational aspects of service provision and telecommunications management; SG3 – Economic and policy issues; SG9 – Broadband cable and TV; SG11 – Signaling requirements, protocols and test specifications; SG13 – Future networks including mobile and NGN; SG16 – Multimedia coding, systems and applications; SG17 – Security.
• IEEE – Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers – P2413 Working Group (WG), Internet of Things Architecture. Also see: IEEE IoT Related Standards.
• OASIS Consortium – formed by IBM, ISIS Papyrus, Microsoft, Primeton. OASIS has the following IoT-related technical committees (TCs): Advanced Message Queueing Protocol, Message Queuing Telemetry Transport, Open Building Information Exchange.
• Weightless – SIG for M2M and IoT formed by Accenture, ARM, Cable & Wireless Communications, CSR, Neul. Weightless-N is a new LPWAN global standard for IoT/M2M wireless connectivity over ISM spectrum.
• oneM2M – a global standards initiative for Machine to Machine Communications and the Internet of Things. Works on specifications for M2M Service Layer to enable scalable global deployment of M2M/IoT.
• Thread – formed by Yale Security, Silicon Labs, Samsung, Google Nest Labs, Freescale, Big Ass Fans, ARM. Working on Wireless Networking Protocol for the Home.

Each of these IoT standards development efforts all are great. The issue is they are overlapping. Hopefully, eventually a single, de factor standard would emerge from these current efforts.

Have ideas or sources on IoT standards? Please share them in the comments section.

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Irena Bojanova is a computer scientist at NIST. She is the founding chair of IEEE CS Cloud  Computing  Special  Technical  Community,  a  Co‐Chair  of  the  IEEE  Reliability Society IoT Technical Committee, and a founding member  of the IEEE Technical Sub‐Committee on Big Data. She is Acting EIC of the IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing, AEIC of the IEEE IT Professional, and AE of the International Journal of Big Data Intelligence (IJBDI). She  is  a  senior  member  of  IEEE  and  can  be  reached  at:  irena.bojanova@computer.org.