Internet of Things – Unraveling technology demands & developments

Every generation is said to tune into current vibration levels and raise it higher for evolution. Evolution of both technology and human life is marked by greater finesse, vividness and presence, all of it driven by evolution of thought. The concept of ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT) is an inspiring vision to bring together innumerable technology advancements in computing & communications, and further evolve those through innovation, to improve quality of human life by interconnecting physical and cyber worlds. High-profile IoT applications include Industrial Control, Home Automation, Smart Retail, Connected Health, Hi-tech Cities, Intelligent Transportation and Logistics .

Figure – IoT Applications (Source: IoT-A)

Per Business Insider Intelligence [refer figure below], Internet of Things will connect devices in never-seen-before scale and at a faster pace than the industry has witnessed so far with PCs/smartphones/tablets, or in the future with wearables. And so the challenge in bringing alive Internet of Things – which is estimated to connect over 50 Billion devices by 2020, in a world populated today with 7.2 billion people & growing a little over 1% – is to make possible connecting devices cost-effectively and efficiently in whopping scale, and in an open world by addressing security needs and alleviating privacy concerns.

Figure – Growth trend & forecast for connected devices (Source: Business Insider)

How IEEE defines Internet-of-Things

Having set out to understand technology demands from IoT, let’s start with a technical definition of the key term. Here is how the IEEE IoT technical community defines it. “The Internet of Things (IoT) is a self-configuring and adaptive system consisting of networks of sensors and smart objects whose purpose is to interconnect “all” things, including everyday and industrial objects, in such a way as to make them intelligent, programmable and more capable of interacting with humans.”

While SDOs (Standard Development Organizations) use the phrase Internet-of-Things/IoT, vendors have coined different terms – ranging Internet-of-Everything (Cisco – Refer my previous article for IoE definition), Industrial Internet (General Electric), Smart & Connected Communities (Cisco’s Smart Cities solution), Smart Planet (IBM) – with either wider or limited scope given their industry play and applicable market segments.

IoT – Key Architectural Layers

Here is a simplified view of technology components that are needed to actualize IoT. To reiterate, IoT is a system formed of “enabling” technologies, and not a specific set of technologies per se.

Figure – Functional View of IoT Technologies (Source: Freescale.com)

Given that multi-service edge connectivity nodes have embedded processing capability, we could aggregate two or more of the building blocks, in the above functional view. Thus, the key layers in the IoT architecture, as exemplified in ITU-T’s IoT reference model below in a more granular manner, are:

1. Sensor/machine infrastructure
2. Communication backbone
3. M2M service layer
4. Application platform

In addition, we have critical overlay functions – Security and Management – that span multiple layers.

Figure – IoT Reference Model (Source: ITU-T)

IoT Technology demands

Let’s now delve into the technology demands of IoT from each of its architectural layers.

The Sensor/Machine Infrastructure layer is formed of sensors, actuators and smart objects that would help onboard the physical world into Internet-of-Things.

Sensor/Machine Infrastructure Layer – Characteristics, Challenges & Technology demands

Light weight, inexpensive, typically single-function, resource-constrained, miniaturized devices with little to no physical security and memory capability Rudimentary network connectivity and therefore need for low power communication protocols Limited compute and cannot support traditional security algorithms Installed in remote/inaccessible locations, or embedded in physical structures, and so wireless devices that operate autonomously in the field, with secure remote management Geo-location based discovery support Ultra-low power circuits and communication Long lifetime devices that can potentially run on a single battery, to avoid incredibly expensive battery replacement, given enormity of deployment scale Super regenerative and ambient energy harvesting capabilities Adaptive to what is happening in the real world, based on events that are either detected directly or by real-time analysis of sensor data Self-organizing and autonomic working, given the scale and lack of accessibility to mounted locations

The Communication Backbone comprises of M2M gateways, multi-service edge and backbone IP/MPLS core nodes, which form the network infrastructure and connect things globally. M2M gateways play a vital role in this architecture as they, along with edge nodes with fog computing capability (i.e. those with compute, storage and network resources between sensors and clouds), aggregate information from innumerable directly-connected endpoint devices with varying compute/memory/network-connectivity capabilities.

Communication Backbone – Technology demands of boundary nodes

Support large number of nodes in highly heterogeneous operating environments through multi-modal technologies (wired/wireless) and variety of protocols such as Zigbee, Bluetooth low energy, WiFi, 3G, 4G Allow for endpoint mobility and geo-distribution Low latency processing and real-time decision making through fog computing Strong safeguards during communication to ensure security and privacy Ruggedized M2M gateways Availability and reliability using backup distributed intelligence to workaround device malfunctions Distributed processing, data collection, network resource preservation and closed loop functioning to ensure that scarce network bandwidth is not wasted, while meeting response time requirements for usecases and ensuring scalability Unlimited addressing capability e.g. through IPv6

The M2M Service Layer, a software layer between transport and application protocol layers, will provide data transport, security, device discovery and device management across a multitude of vertical domains, independent of communication technologies in the lower layers. This will help ensure connectivity between devices and various M2M applications, to realize horizontally integrated Internet-of-Things, as against vertical silos or ‘Intranet-of-Things’ for specific applications. This layer should ensure semantic modeling of things by providing context for the information that “things” can provide, or actuations they can perform. For e.g., while providing data from a temperature sensor for home automation, it should also describe if it is the indoor temperature of a room, or the temperature of a fridge etc.

The IoT Application Platform, powered by transformative technologies such as Cloud and Big Data Analytics, will host IoT applications for global users.

The result of such a layered architecture is a globally accessible network of things, providers and consumers, who can create businesses, contribute content, generate and purchase new services.

Figure – IoT Applications with ‘enabling’ technologies (Source: Freescale.com)

While connectivity devices and technologies have existed for long, each of the discussed components in the IoT architecture will need to go through one or more evolution phases, until it passes the following two key litmus tests, which drive the need for innovation and eventually standardization.

1. Is it technically & economically effective and efficient for IoT scale?
2. Can it handle the implications of operating in an open world?

So, let’s take a look at industry efforts around innovation and standardization, in the next section.

IoT – Interoperability through Standards & Collaboration

With IoT predicted to create roughly $15 trillion in value-at-stake over the next 10 years, we have just about every vendor exploring market adjacencies to tap into this market potential. About 66% of the total value i.e. $9.5T is forecast to come from specific industry verticals (e.g. Smart Grid, Connected Healthcare), while the remaining 34% or $4.9T would be derived horizontally across industries (e.g. knowledge-worker productivity, travel avoidance). This has prompted vendors to form alliances among themselves, and with SDOs to drive vertical specific and cross-industry innovations/standardizations as applicable.

While standards bodies are effective at reaching multi-stakeholder consensus, and are efficient in comparison to letting market pick winners and losers among alternative technologies, industry-led consortia are comparatively faster, adaptive to market conditions and allow dominant players to push forward their interests. Cross-industry collaboration could also help quicken the pace of IoT adoption by increasing affordability through economy of scale benefits, and enable future applications as yet unimagined.

Below is a snapshot of the heterogeneous standards environment in IoT, as of a couple of years ago. Since then, the ecosystem has seen more protocol innovations – ModBus, IEEE WAVE 1609.2, Deterministic Ethernet, Power line communication (IEEE 1901 and IEEE 1901.2), Ultra-Wide Bandwidth (UWB) Technology to name a few – and thus further increasing heterogeneity. However vendors and SDOs are involved in concerted efforts, to bring in interoperability among architectural layers and across IoT applications spanning industry verticals, to address this dire challenge in realizing the vision of Internet-of-Things.

Figure – Heterogeneous standards environment in IoT (Source: IoT Research EU)

Let’s now go over various working groups that have sprouted in the IoT space, to supplement technology innovation and interoperability efforts from SDOs such as ITU-T, ETSI, IEEE and IETF typically focused on specific OSI layers, or drive joint standards across SDOs.

Working Group (Active Since)	Charter	Founding Members
IPSO Alliance (Sep 2008)	Establish Internet Protocol (IP) as the network to interconnect smart objects, and allow existing infrastructure to be readily used without translation gateways or proxies	ARM, Atmel, Bosch, Cooper, Dust Networks, EDF, Ericsson, Freescale et al
IoT-A (2010-2013)	Developed an architectural reference model to allow seamless integration of heterogeneous IoT technologies into a coherent architecture to realize ‘Internet of Things’ rather than ‘Intranet of Things’	ALU, Hitachi, IBM, NEC, NXP, SAP, Siemens, and universities – “Mission Accomplished late 2013”
oneM2M (2012)	Develop technical specifications for a common M2M Service Layer to allow connectivity between devices and various M2M applications, to realize horizontally integrated Internet-of-Things	Leading ICT standards bodies namely ETSI, ARIB, TTC, ATIS, TIA, CCSA and TTA
AllSeen Alliance (2013)	Collaborate for an open, universal IoT software framework across devices and industry applications, based on AllJoyn open source project, originally developed by Qualcomm but now released to community developers	Qualcomm, in collaboration with Linux Foundation
Industrial Internet Consortium (Mar 2014)	Accelerate development and adoption of intelligent industrial automation for public usecases	AT&T, Cisco, GE, Intel, IBM
HomePlug Alliance (Apr 2014)	Develop technology specs for powerline networking to enable home connectivity	AMD, 3Com, Cisco, Intel, Intellon, Texas Instruments, Motorola, Panasonic at al
HyperCat (May 2014)	Develop an open specification for IoT that will make data available in a way that others could make use of it, through a thin interoperability layer.	ARM, BT, IBM, Intel, Living PlanIT, et al
Open Interconnect Consortium (Jul 2014)	Define interoperable device communication standards (for peer-to-peer, mesh & bridging, reporting & control etc.) across verticals, and provide an open source implementation	Atmel, Broadcom, Dell, Intel, Samsung and Wind River
IEEE P2413 (Jul 2014)	Create a standard interoperability architecture and define commonly understood data objects, for information sharing across IoT systems; Standardization targeted by 2016	IEEE; collaborating with oneM2M, ETSI and other SDOs to evolve joint standards
Thread (2014)	Create an open, secure, simple, power-efficient protocol, based on robust mesh network that runs over standard 802.15.4 radios, and can support a wide variety of home products	ARM, Freescale, Nest, Samsung, Silicon Labs, Yale
OMA LWM2M (2014)	Proposed a new Light-weight M2M protocol standard, based on client-server model for remote management of M2M devices and related service enablement	OMA

I haven’t included Apple’s HomeKit & HealthKit software platforms though the company has inducted home/health device manufacturing partners, as it wasn’t really a consortium led effort.

As can be observed in the above table, many more vendors have come together in 2014 and formed new consortia, with well-defined charters even if overlapping ones. The developments so far have been encouraging, given that the ecosystem has been able to drive protocol innovations (e.g. IEEE 802.15.4, LWM2M, HyperCat, etc.), arrive at an all-encompassing IoT reference architecture (IoT-A), identify the need for an M2M Service Layer (oneM2M) and hopefully many more that I’m not aware of, as yet.

Are things looking up for IoT?

Let me wrap up the post with my key takeaways, from this analysis on IoT technology demands and developments.

Given that multiple protocols have always existed in each layer of the OSI stack, it is not realistic to expect the ecosystem to converge on a single protocol standard for each layer in the IoT reference model, considering varied applications needs and diverse physical operating conditions for connected devices. However, basic IoT requirements such as humungous scale, strong security safeguards and lightweight remote management of devices will demand that protocols in each layer be evolved or revamped. Consortia led efforts such as those from Thread, HomePlug, HyperCat and OMA LWM2M that drive focused innovations, keeping in mind the need to ease migration or ensure compatibility with existing protocol standards and other IoT advancements, should help quicken the pace of IoT evolution.

On the technology standardization/innovation front, the pace of development has been assuring [as I’ve elaborated in the previous section]. There certainly aren’t any tangential efforts or cases of SDOs locking horns that could potentially dampen IoT technology development. On the contrary, multiple interop events are being jointly organized to evolve IoT specifications, especially around IoT architecture and its critical M2M Service Layer to accommodate IoT applications spanning industry sectors.

There is certainly lot more for me to dig into on the IoT front, be it developments in sensors/actuators/smart objects, IoT gateways & controllers, communication protocols, security or management aspects. Now that we’ve figured out how to make sense of the Internet-of-Things world, what we know about it and what we don’t, let’s learn more on IoT aspects that interest us and redefine the coordinates of IoT, some another day.

Until then, if you have any views on my post that could help me reconstruct Internet-of-Things better, please share those in the comments section.

Are Smart Cities becoming a reality with Internet of Everything?

Our planet is now urbanized. In the words of Ban Ki-moon, UN Secretary General, we now live in the ‘urban century’.

In the 20^th century, only 1 in every 10 people lived in urban areas. It was in 2008 that the world’s population crossed the line of being more than 50% urban, which is projected to reach 75% by 2050. While this could fuel economic growth, rapid urbanization will heavily stress infrastructure in cities, given higher demands for transportation, water, energy, housing, healthcare et al. With finite resources, limited budgets, demographic shifts and climate change concerns, cities will need to use innovative technologies strategically, to achieve urban efficiency and improve quality of living, and most importantly make it economically and environmentally sustainable.

What makes a Smart City?

There is no tipping point after which a city using ICT can be termed ‘smart’. However, I’ve listed some solutions that can increase a city’s urban performance and smartness quotient, by optimizing use of natural resources, improving cost efficiencies and managing infrastructure that keeps cities running smoothly.

Smart City Concept – Source: DefenseForumIndia.com

Energy

• Intelligent and weather adaptive street lighting
• Smart energy meters in homes and businesses to regulate energy consumption
• Homes feeding any excess solar energy harvested into smart electric grid

Transportation

• Smart traffic management by discovering emergency routes and intelligently rerouting traffic in case of adverse climate conditions, accidents or traffic jams using smart billboards
• Monitoring vehicle and pedestrian levels to optimize driving routes, traffic lights and installation of overhead walkways
• Monitoring of parking spaces and providing drivers assistance in locating an empty slot

Safety & Security

• Video surveillance solutions to monitor crime levels, and automatic-sense-and-respond capabilities to prevent or contain natural disaster damages, and improve evacuation/police/ambulance/fire service response
• Monitoring of vibrations and material conditions in buildings, bridges and historical monuments

Waste

• Detection of waste type and fill levels in containers to optimize trash collection routes and methods
• Automated tunneling of waste to compost plans in multi-tenant dwelling units
• Automation of waste segregation and treatment plants

Water

• Detection of water leaks using sensors and pipe pressure variation, to fix aging infrastructure
• Monitoring water quality to ensure optimum level of chemicals used to treat water, and detection of impurities
• Smart water meters for better gauging consumption levels
• Storm water and waste water treatment plants

Air

• Monitoring of pollutants and radiation levels in manufacturing and nuclear zones, to generate leakage alerts and avert health threats to local citizens
• Monitoring noise levels in school, hospital and central zones

Internet-of-Everything for Cities

Traditionally, cities have built infrastructure silos to address transportation, energy, water, safety, waste management and similar needs. Also, vertical specific IT infrastructure management solutions were deployed to reap technology benefits. However such independent solutions rule out the possibility of sharing information, intelligence and IT resources across various city infrastructure, stunting the potential to scale and keep up with growing urban population.

In the Smart City context, IoE will serve as a digital overlay to unify city infrastructure, its people, things and data. IoE is not a single technology, but rather a concept. Just like the Internet, the Internet of Everything (IoE) would come alive as a system that can provide Smart City services, once the stack of ICT hardware and software intelligence is added to the underlying physical infrastructure, to enable P2M (people-to-machine) and M2M (machine-to-machine) communication.

In a larger context, IoE is thought of as the confluence of consumer, business and industrial internet, and thus can enable P2P (people-to-people), P2M and M2M communications. IoE connects people, data, things, and processes in networks of billions of automatic connections, unlike today where one must proactively connect to the network and to one another, via personal devices and social media to gather information. These automatic connections would create vast amounts of data, which when analyzed (either in information-gathering end devices or fog computing nodes) and used intelligently can allow for real-time decision making, and thus have boundless applications including Smart City solutions listed in the previous section.

IoE Architecture for Smart Cities

So, for a Smart City to be built, what are the various components that need to come together?

Smart City OS is the virtual application platform that aggregates open innovations from businesses and individual citizens (e.g. Smart City apps built using intelligence from the Digital Cloud on which it runs), and serve as the ‘operations center’ for public services.

The Digital Cloud denotes the cloud platform (with embedded SW & HW) that aggregates intelligence spanning multiple usecases of Smart Cities, and more widely across IoE applications, namely Smart Homes, Smart Transport (V2X applications), Smart Industry, Smart Health and Smart Living/Entertainment, that could benefit from composite information. Having a national digital grid for various IoE applications could help tap into gestalt effect benefits. A high-speed communications network built on fiber-optic and WiFi backbone network, will serve as the hardware platform that moves data from smart objects  and sensors for aggregation in the Digital Cloud.

Sensor/Machine infrastructure will be formed of existing physical infrastructure equipped with wired/wireless sensors and M2M devices, to enable detection and notification of events to the higher layers in the IoE architecture.

IoE for Cities – Architectural Framework; Source Cisco.com

My understanding is that existing CAM (Cloud/Analytics/Mobility) technologies are ready to power up the ‘Digital Grid’ in the above architecture and make it functional today, though the complexities of a large-scale national deployment are yet to be understood.

The key challenge would be in identifying cost-effective, scalable and interoperable technology solutions to build the Sensor/Machine infrastructure, and ensuring raw/filtered data flows through to the Digital Grid. As can be expected, considerable work needs to be done to actualize the operations center, ‘Smart City OS’.

Smart City Pilot Projects

According to a BBC news article, IBM had nearly 2500 smart city projects around the world in 2013. Few governments that the company had worked with, on Smart City initiatives, are Dublin (parking), Dubuque (water), Rio (traffic), Singapore (traffic), Stockholm (traffic) and California (traffic). There have also been citizen/academia led initiatives as those in New York (rain water/sewage) and London (pollution, weather, river levels) where the local government opened up city data to the public, or Kickstarter Air Quality Egg project led by Pachube (now Xively) which deploys its own sensing network globally, to gather air quality data. While pilot projects in existing cities have focused on specific applications, new cities have been successful in testing and deploying more comprehensive Smart City solutions.

Over the years, infrastructure has gotten smarter in existing cities, as retrofitting smart tech into existing infrastructure has been going on for a while now, in just about every main city around the world – Barcelona, Copenhagen, Vienna, Manchester, Paris, Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Boston, Seattle, Orlando, Dublin, London, Amsterdam, Rio de Janeiro, Sofia, Johannesburg, Singapore, Hong Kong, Santiago de Chile, Mexico City, Bogota – to name a few that I specifically came across online, in this context.

Significant Greenfield Projects

In Asia-Pacific and Middle East, there have been a number of greenfield projects, with Songdo in South Korea and Masdar in UAE being the best known examples. In such greenfield projects, deployment of the ICT infrastructure is planned into the city’s construction from the beginning, allowing for systems to be integrated.

Work has been underway since 2004, on the $35B project termed Songdo International Business District, a 1500-acre new city in South Korea targeted to accommodate 15,000 smart homes, 65,000 residents and 300,000 commuters by 2018. The city boasts of a pneumatic system that funnels garbage to its waste-energy generation plant, and ICT infrastructure that allows for better monitoring of energy use, traffic, water and waste, apart from remote healthcare, virtual concierge, intelligent tutoring services made possible through high quality video communication infrastructure. With 33,000 residents so far, the capital energy use in Songdo is on average 40% lower than any existing city of comparable scale. It is reported that the developer charges a premium for these homes given its sustainability features. And so, in such private projects, affordability will be the key for smart cities to be socially accepted and become the norm.

High-tech solar-powered Masdar City in UAE, which is claimed to be the world’s first sustainable city, set out to prove that cities can be sustainable even in environmental conditions as harsh as its deserts. The city is managed by the Abu Dhabi government via a subsidiary, and it boasts of green educational and business districts with driverless electric vehicles, reduced demand for air conditioning, movement sensors replacing light switches and taps, clean air etc. However, it had come under fire for being sparely populated because of lack of affordable housing. It is expected to break ground soon with 500 smart private homes which will grow upto 2000 homes, 40000 residents and 50000 workers at a price tag of $15-18B.

PlanIT Valley near Porto, Portugal is yet another smart city that would be built ground up by Living PlanIT with smart technologies from various vendors, and its own Urban Operating System (UOS) to manage daily processes and gather data from smart sensors deployed throughout the city. This smart city development has been classified as a Project of National Interest (PIN) and is backed by the local government, while Living PlanIT’s founders themselves own the land and fund it.

Panasonic developed Fujisawa SST (Sustainable Smart Town) in Japan is aimed at showcasing renewable (solar) energy generation while reducing greenhouse gas emissions and cutting water use. The smart town continues to grow its resident base, as it develops its infrastructure to house 1000 households, when the project completes in 2018. The city manages its energy needs in real time by coordinating data from sensors linked to home appliances.

Does it pay to invest in Smart Cities?

Every greenfield smart city project, be it Songdo/Masdar/Fujisawa SST, has resulted in substantial environmental benefits through energy/water savings and reduced carbon emissions. However, there have been limited disclosures on profitability and TCO savings of such greenfield ventures and assumed lifespan for these calculations.

In comparison, ROI has been captured and made public for brownfield smart city projects. For e.g., Smart garbage solution in Finland brought down waste collection costs by 30%; smart lighting solution in UK resulted in 7% crime reduction without additional manpower investments; immersive video conferencing in USA lowered travel expenses by 15%. In addition, digitization is seen to fuel GDP growth and lower unemployment rate through job creation.

Given steady demographic shifts toward an aging population in major economies, Smart City initiatives could help lower workforce costs by automating City Infrastructure Management (CIM). Also, CIM maintenance activities could potentially be outsourced to other countries around the world, as they can be remotely managed.

So, are Smart Cities becoming a reality with IoE?

Well, given significant pilot efforts around the globe, I’d say that we’ve now entered the era of Smart Cities. How soon it touches us depends on where you or I live in the world!

I started exploring this topic, as we’d soon be hosting a panel discussion, on ‘Realizing the vision of Smart Cities in India’, in a local industry conference. The field of smart technologies and IoE/IoT is certainly buzzing with activity, given entrepreneurial efforts and industry cum government initiatives such as IoT Living Lab in Electronic City, 100 Smart Cities in India, Digital India, etc.

This Smart City intro post was mostly focused on aspects of environmental sciences [subject seemed to lack zing and certainly not my cup of tea!]. Let me now get back to my IT roots and explore underlying IoE technologies beyond Cloud-Analytics-Mobile-Social, their maturity level, industry standardization efforts, affordability factor and thus how far/close we are to widespread adoption.

[And there goes my last bit of resolve to limit post lengths. Well, my blog posts are anyways intended to capture a well-rounded perspective on what is going on in a technology area/market segment, rather than border on technology journalism.]

Will be back with more details, on IoE efforts around the globe or more closer home to make world’s cities smarter, as I prep up for the panel discussion in the coming weeks.