Blogs

Make sense of Internet of Things standards

Forty years ago, I worked on software that monitored and controlled its physical environment, in telephone exchanges, writes Dr. Chris Harding is Director for Interoperability at The Open Group. I have been away from that world for a long time, but am now becoming involved with similar problems, as I work on standards for the Internet of Things (IoT).

I feel like the fictional character Rip Van Winkle, who went to sleep for twenty years, and woke up to find that everything had changed … except that little has changed in one respect, so far as I can see. The software that interfaces to physical devices is much as it was in the late 1970s.

Device interfacing – Unchanged for 40 years

Computing devices have become much more powerful since then. Operating systems have evolved. Interconnection of computers via the internet is now taken for granted. Other aspects of software architecture have been transformed but, when it comes to device interfaces, it is still a question of reading voltage levels on wires, using analogue-to-digital converters. These may be smaller and more powerful than they were, but are otherwise much the same.

Some sensors are a bit more intelligent. They can do analogue-to-digital conversion, and send their readings to controllers using serial interfaces. I am comfortable with this, too. We had teletypes with serial interfaces in the old days.

The cheap wireless revolution

I fear that my crumbs of comfort will soon be swept away. Cheap wireless will revolutionise the way we use devices. The technology is there now, but it is still too expensive. A homeowner who is willing to pay more than fifty dollars can have a wireless thermometer on his wall. An industrial manufacturer, who will not pay more than five dollars, cannot yet put one in his product.

He will be able to do so soon, though, perhaps this year. The necessary miniaturised wireless components are becoming available. The impact on interface software will be huge. A multitude of special-purpose hardware layouts, each requiring custom-built software, will be replaced by a small number of wireless interfaces, and software to drive them will be available “off the shelf”.

Messages and data formats

This will require standards for messages and data formats exchanged between devices and controllers. Smart home systems today use lower-level communication standards such as Wi-Fi and Zigbee to connect to devices, but have different message and data structures for information exchange. You generally cannot use a device from one system with a controller from another. Zigbee does include message and data-format specifications, but these are not often followed by systems using other standards at lower levels.

The need for standards is becoming clear. Gartner forecasts that 6.4 billion connected things will be in use worldwide in 2016, supporting total services spending of $235 billion. Their analyst Jim Tully says, “IoT services are the real driver of value in IoT”. It is by enabling IoT service development and integration that message and data format standards will really show their worth.

Lack of these standards is not an acceptable situation for industrial manufacturers or for Internet of Things service providers. They want components and subsystems with standard interfaces to integrate into their products and services. They know that standards give them control over their suppliers, and bring down costs. They have the marketplace muscle to get what they want.

Standards for the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things is a hot topic in the standards community. International standards body ISO/IEC JTC1 has formed a Work Group on the Internet of Things (WG10) and is developing a reference architecture. The World-Wide Web consortium (W3C) is evolving the concept of the Web of Things. The Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) has published a reference model. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has defined the Constrained Applications Protocol (CoAP). The MQTT inter-process message queuing protocol is now an OASIS standard. The Open Group has published the Open Messaging Interface (O-MI) and Open Data Format (O-DF) standards for the Internet of things.

Many of the standards that are needed probably exist, but we do not yet understand their relative importance, deployment, and application. That is what we are addressing now.

Rip van Winkle slept through the war of American independence and the establishment of the USA. These were events of historic importance. The emergence of a coherent standards basis for the Internet of Things is not quite in that category, but will still underpin a large and increasingly important part of the global economy. I am glad that I am back in time to see it.