The vision of a single IoT umbrella bringing together all the world’s connected things is probably unachievable and unnecessary – some applications will live perfectly well in siloes, with the cloud-layer of connectivity providing the universal link that the Big Data advocates require in order to crunch all the data generated by the connected things.
However, there will be an industry-driven need to turn the IoT into a homogeneous addressable market, since if all kinds of ‘things’ use fairly generic base platforms, there will be massive scale for vendors and carriers, as well as simpler and cheaper R&D and implementation plans.
So whether or not the end users will need this degree of harmony, there will be moves towards it. If they have any chance of success, there will need to be a streamlining of the many options available for objects to discover, connect to, and communicate with one another, and then link to a hub or the cloud.
As 2014 closed, there were almost too many would-be standards to count. Some are in direct competition for a defined area of activity (Bluetooth Low Energy and Thread, for instance, in the smart home WPAN). Others are targeting different activities but will need to interact (AllJoyn for discovery/communication, MQTT and its rivals for inter-device messaging, and the various physical layer protocols from Bluetooth to WiFi).
In some cases it may benefit innovation and consumer choice if more than one standard endures, provided these can be integrated at the communication or application layer (ZigBee, Thread and Bluetooth LE could all have enough differentiated value in the diverse applications of the smart home to stay alive, with higher layer technologies talking to all of them neutrally).
More standards efforts are sure to emerge in 2015, as various stakeholders seek to boost their influence on how the IoT shapes itself, while others will merge or fade away. In many cases, vendor-driven initiatives will establish ‘open’ credentials through industry alliances or open source processes, and then perhaps submit their specifications to real standards bodies (with all the complications for patent licensing this line of events entails). AllJoyn, Thread and others retain the clear imprint of their founders, Qualcomm and Nest/Google, respectively, and reflect the political and commercial aims of those giants even as they present themselves as open, de facto standards.
Both could conceivably gain sufficient cross-industry backing to dilute the influence of the founder (though that never happened with Android) and to become part of a future effort driven by the IETF, IEEE or other standards heavyweight.
As the year begins, some of the blocs are becoming visible around key technologies though their support bases remain fluid. For instance, in late 2014, Cisco, ABB and Bosch announced an as-yet-unnamed formalization of their smart home platform initiative, but minus original partner LG. The Korean firm’s U-Plus carrier unit, however, has become a board member of another group focused on the home, the Z-Wave Alliance.
LG U-Plus seems a strange fit for a connectivity platform but the semi-proprietary Z-Wave mesh technology may be part of the operator’s reported plan for a smart home offering based around its quad play services. It may also be part of the wider strategy of parent firm LG, which has a strong interest in selling smart home devices via its home appliances, home entertainment, HVAC and mobile divisions – it is also implementing the oneM2M specs via U-Plus, and is a premier member of the AllSeen Alliance to boot.
AllSeen is likely to prove one of the enduring influences on the IoT, partly because of Qualcomm’s power and its strong supporters’ list, but also because it is actually producing useful, real technology. The Alliance, formed when Qualcomm open sourced its AllJoyn technology for device-to-device communications, now has over 100 members, including LG and Panasonic. Qualcomm itself puts out a steady stream of products incorporating AllJoyn, and it is set to be part of Microsoft’s Windows 10 – a rather large win.
At CES, various AllJoyn-enabled products were show, including a system in which LG TVs, Panasonic speakers and the Spotify music service worked together, not just to control the choice of songs to be streamed, but to offer added value such as notifications of tracks playing.
And the AllSeen Alliance itself announced the first release of its open source AllJoyn Gateway Agent at the show. This shows how AllSeen is moving up the stack from its roots in discovery to management of apps and devices. An extension of the AllJoyn framework, the Gateway Agent provides a common and secure remote access method for AllJoyn gadgets and apps to connect to the cloud, the internet, and other external services or personal area networks/device clusters.
The gateway system allows for remote management and, most important, security and privacy control, for IoT products supporting AllJoyn. As well as standard connectivity, it boasts end-to-end encryption, while granular levels of access control and privacy can be set for each device. A standard API (application programming interface) extends the existing AllJoyn interoperability to a far wider range of external networks and remote services, by supporting protocol connectors that plug into a standard AllJoyn Gateway Agent API. This connector approach also enables connectivity, interaction and integration over a variety of protocols including REST, XMPP, MQTT and TR-069.
“There are millions of connected devices on the market and that number is growing exponentially,” said Art Lancaster, chair of the AllSeen Alliance Gateway Working Group (and also CTO of Affinegy, a connected device management start-up). He added: “The AllSeen Alliance believes that consumers should have control over these devices and their data – with the assurance that these connections are both private and secure. The AllJoyn Gateway Agent is the industry’s first standard way to connect IoT devices and applications with such confidence.” The Gateway Agent can be installed on Linux or OpenWRT WiFi routers, and the code is shipping now, in sharp contrast to many other IoT bodies with their often-vague timescales.
Another group with heavyweight backing, often portrayed as a direct AllSeen rival (though more overlapping than head-to-head), is the OIC (Open Interconnect Consortium), whose real world code is further off reality, but which also has a strong membership list. It has open sourced its IoTivity project this week, (see separate piece) and has finally moved beyond its rather nebulous mission statement of defining the connectivity requirements and ensuring interoperability of the billions of devices that will make up the emerging IoT”.
Founded by Atmel, Broadcom (which quietly dropped out over IP disputes), Dell, Intel, Samsung and Intel subsidiary Wind River, the OIC boosted its membership by 30% at year end with 16 new sign-ups. Its most notable additions were ADT, the Korean R&D center ETRI, CableLabs, GE Software, HP, Lenovo and Siemens.
Of course, these various power blocs will not just be driven by mobile and computing vendors any more. They will have to take account of the interests of a different set of stakeholders in each IoT vertical – auto makers in the connected car, washing machine suppliers in the smart home and so on. Creating some kind of unified ‘super-IoT’ platform would not just mean integrating different protocols and APIs, but the aims and ambitions of all these diverse players too. Korean chaebols may often house home appliances, cars and mobile technology under one roof, but elsewhere in the world, these different groups have little common ground or mutual understanding.
The big names in each vertical will be determined to drive the way the IoT is shaped in their own worlds, a factor which will play against a single umbrella. GE has been the most prominent example, turning its internal Industrial Internet initiative into an industry alliance aiming to set standards for IoT management and big data in sectors such as aerospace and heavy machinery. The carmakers were as prominent as the in-vehicle infotainment providers at CES, while the major vendors of household appliances are jostling for position in the smart home.
This was seen in the Bosch tie-up with Cisco/ABB; Samsung’s and LG’s backing for various alliances, from the viewpoint of their washing machines and air conditioners as much as their wireless systems; the prominent position of Electrolux and Whirlpool in several initiatives. Electrolux’s CTO, Jan Brockmann, is a vocal champion of smart home standards, and indicates the way that the industry will have to listen to these unfamiliar taskmasters. At CES, Brockmann called on large IT players to cooperate on IoT protocols rather than politicize them, and told Network World: “I want them to talk and sort out their problems.” In particular, he has been lobbying in Las Vegas for the AllSeen Alliance.
Other IoT standards-in-waiting at CES:
The following are some of the IoT specifications which were being talked up at CES this week, and which have sufficient vendor or standards body support to gain real influence on the way this market starts to become defined during 2015:
The Open Mobile Alliance’s Lightweight Machine to Machine (LWM2M) standard, due to come out of its public beta release very soon. It will be boosted by its tight integration with ARM’s new mBed OS IoT development platform which will give it broad vendor reach. LWM2M is built on top of the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) messaging standard and enables remote firmware upgrades, device monitoring and configuration, and device provisioning. It draws on many of the decade-old body’s work in mobile device management, but was redesigned specifically for IoT gadgets with low bandwidth, memory and processing capabilities. It defines the interface between the device and the server, based on CoAP and DTLS (datagram transport layer security), which are then bound to SMS or UDP replies. Although conceived in the cellular world, it can also work over WiFi, ZigBee and 6LoWPAN. It can be used in conjunction with other standards, particularly the non-IP platforms which will continue to have an important role in many segments for years to come.
LoRa (long range) technologies are important in smart cities, supporting low data rate, very low power communications over long distances, often from sensors. Such technologies have been adopted by various specialist firms like Semtech, but the newly formed LoRa Alliance seeks to establish global standards for this branch of IoT networking, promising a common protocol with interoperability testing and certification. The Alliance, and the LoRaWAN protocol, were unveiled at CES and aim to achieve a standardized way to connect multiple applications into the same infrastructure without the need for numerous local installations (a goal also set in similar environments by Sigfox – see separate item). Initial supporters include IBM and Cisco, and three operators heavily involved in M2M services – Swisscom, KPN and Proximus.
This is one of many bodies in which IBM is playing a key role, as the giant aims to tap into the IoT both for its big data services and as a way to drive industry standards. It is the power behind MQTT and a major participant in GE’s Industrial Internet Initiative, and for LoRaWAN it has open sourced a device development platform called ‘LoRaWAN in C’.
Erik Hoving, CTO of The Netherlands’ KPN, commented: “Standardizing the communication to allow interoperability between large scale low power wide area network (LPWAN) deployments is essential to unlock the volumes for IoT.”
The UPnP Forum is seeking to enhance its role in the IoT by promising inter-device communication standards which are blind to the particular vertical segment or vendor. The Forum has announced new UPnP+ specifications and certification level, which will help with “providing safe, reliable interoperable access to services and information regardless of the vertical segment or vendor,” according to a statement by president Scott Lofgren, who added: “To become truly successful, the IoT requires an open means for allowing devices to find one another and communicate. Without multivendor interoperability, things might simply come to a grinding halt at any time.”
The new platform uses new and existing UPnP Device Control Protocols (DCPs) and the UPnP Cloud architecture, allowing all kinds of devices to reach across the IoT and discover one another, or cloud services, via IPv6. “Our next-generation UPnP+ standard takes a step beyond consumer media devices and is focused on delivering new technical capabilities to enhance functionality and provide a more sophisticated, intuitive and deeper user experience across different platforms,” boasted Lofgren. The web browser controls target a wide range of functions in areas such as health and fitness, energy management, sensor management, security and sustainability.
The GE-driven Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) is expected to complete its work on a broad reference architecture during the current quarter and also plans to create three testbeds and to identify gaps where new standards may be needed in future. Led by GE, AT&T, Cisco, IBM and Intel, the IIC has 115 members.
According to EE Times, its first document will define functional areas such as sensors, data analytics and business applications, and identify the technologies and standards to enable them. In most cases it will seek to use existing standards or de facto offerings but will also seek to define new ones where there are gaps. The framework will have several variants for different vertical sectors such as aerospace, healthcare, manufacturing, smart cities and transportation and there will be a separate section devoted to security, as well as a six-page standard vocabulary, seeking to unify the terms that all players use for important aspects of the IoT. GE, which already monitors and analyzes data from 50m data elements and 10m sensors a day, says it will make the software that does that, Predix, available to any company in 2015 to create a harmonized apps ecosystem for asset management and big data.