Fragmentation threatens the internet of things (IoT) because of the sheer number of connectivity and software frameworks seeking to bring all those billions of gadgets together. That has encouraged various bodies to try to create umbrella standards which could allow all the various protocols and APIs to interoperate seamlessly – to the extent that there is now the danger of chaos breaking out among all the ‘harmony’ efforts.
The latest does come from a bona fide standards group rather than a hopeful vendor and its friends, with the IEEE embarking on its effort to ensure that its P2413 technology can be the unifier of the IoT.
Bodies like the IEEE are often criticized for being slow-moving and over-political, but Oleg Loginov, chair of the P2413 taskgroup, has been vocal in defending a ‘proper’ standards process, rather than one driven by de facto technologies and individual power bases. At the initiation of the effort in July, he said in an interview: “Any major technological shift, and IoT is probably the most significant one in history, starts with islands of innovation.These early activities have to transform into global standards enabling the economy of scale and vibrant ecosystems.”
Now he has been updating the IEEE’s IoT Workshop on the progress of the fledgling framework, which aims to support interoperability among connected devices and their associated applications in home automation, industrial systems, telematics and other sectors which will harness the IoT in one form or another. The idea is to accept that each segment will have its own approach, its own technology and user experience requirements, and its own preferred frameworks – but all should be able to share data seamlessly.
“The activities in the internet of things today are disjointed,” Logvinov told the workshop in Silicon Valley and was supported by another participant, IDC analyst Michael Palma, who said in his presentation that there were seven major industry groups, apart from the IEEE, which aim to devise an umbrella framework.
Of course, these are often reminiscent of the old story of the blind men in a room with an elephant, each starting from a different part of the IoT elephant and creating their would-be standards based on those assumptions. So vertical industry alliances like the GE-led Industrial Internet Consortium, and consumer-focused initiatives like Qualcomm’s AllSeen or Google/Nest’s Thread Alliance, only view the problem from one angle, and often from different positions in the stack, even while all claim to be providing unifying layers to avoid IoT fragmentation.
“What they need is the Rosetta Stone to make everything talk and work together,” Palma said, and the IEEE may have more credibility, and a genuinely all-encompassing world view, to provide that Stone and pull all the disparate alliances and interest groups together.
“They need a place where they can come together and move forward as a scalable, unified platform,” Logvinov told the meeting. “That type of unification can be enabled only by a global, international standard.”
Dr. Julian Goldman, director of medical device interoperability at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, said the healthcare industry has lived with islands of innovation, since all the various medical monitoring gadgets were not designed to share information – and the impact of that is felt in the quality of data at doctors’ disposal for diagnosis or treatment. “If we don’t look at the lessons today in healthcare, the internet of things is not going to be an internet of things, it’s going to be a pile of things,” Goldman said, as quoted by IDG News.
The initial objective of the P2413 group is to define the basic elements of IoT systems which are common to all segments and then to allow information coming from different platforms to be converted into data objects of a common format. The goal is to finish the standard in 2016. There will also be cooperation with other standard bodies’ efforts in the IoT area, including programs at ETSI, the ISO and oneM2M.
The P2413 group currently includes representatives from 23 vendors and organizations including Cisco, Huawei, General Electric, Oracle, Qualcomm and the ZigBee Alliance.