Vision and Challenges for Realising the Internet of Things

The traffic in the Internet of Things networks
for queries about unique identifiers will be
many times higher than that for DNS queries
in the current Internet.
In this context the Internet of Things deployment
will require the development of
new technologies that need to address the
global ID schemes, identity management,
identity encoding/encryption, authentication
and repository management using identification
and addressing schemes and the creation
of global directory lookup services and discovery
services for Internet of Things applications
with various unique identifier schemes.
3.3.2 Internet of Things Architecture
Technology
In Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) it
becomes imperative for the providers and
requestors to communicate meaningfully
with each other despite the heterogeneous
nature of the underlying information structures,
business artefacts, and other documents.
This requirement is termed as semantic
interoperability. Often technology is perceived
to be the biggest impediment to effective
collaboration and integration between
requestors and providers; however it is usually
the problem of semantic interoperability
which is the root cause. Semantic interoperability
can be achieved between heterogeneous
information systems (service providers and
service requestors) in a multitude of ways. On
one extreme, development of comprehensive
shared information models can facilitate semantic
interoperability among the participant
applications and businesses. However, the
problem with this approach is its rigidity,
which translates to inflexibility when it comes
to business processes leveraging SOA. On the
other extreme, semantic interoperability can
be achieved by providing appropriate semantic
mediators (translators) at each participant’s
end, to facilitate the conversion to the
information format which the participant
understands. Most often systems use a combination
of context independent shared information
models, coupled with context specific
information specialization approaches to
achieve semantic interoperability.
Scalability, modularity, extensibility and interoperability
among heterogeneous things
and their environments are key design requirements
for the Internet of Things, in order
to ensure an open playing field for solution
providers and developers, while users
also benefit from a competitive marketplace
of solutions, from which applications can be
assembled.
As things move and interact with their environment,
events are automatically generated.
These events can subsequently be enhanced
with additional semantic information that
expresses the context in which each event
happened, to explain why something occurred,
such as why a thing was observed at a
location or how and why it interacted with
another thing. There is considerable scope
for further research and innovation regarding
novel methods of automatically interpreting
events, adding semantic annotation and even
predicting what will happen next and what
precautionary measures should be taken.
Architecture standards for the IoT should
support the unambiguous communication of
events and additional semantic information,
without prescribing the implementation details
of how they are generated.
The decentralised and heterogeneous nature
of things and the entities with which they
interact requires a scalable, flexible, open,
layered, event-driven architecture of standards
that minimises or eliminates any bias
towards any single programming language,
operating system, information transport
mechanism or other technology and makes
efficient use of available network connectivity
and energy, where required.
When architecting the Internet of Things, it is
important to remember that many things will
not have permanent network connectivity -
indeed some things may have no intrinsic
network connectivity, but rely on supporting
intelligence in their local environment or in
remote information systems. Things will
therefore need the ability to communicate
their location, state and requirements to information
systems that have more permanent
or more reliable network connectivity.
Through such information systems, a digital
counterpart of the thing can be monitored or
even displayed in a virtual representation,
such that remote authorized entities could
query or update the state of an individual
thing or influence its destiny. There is therefore
a need for the IoT architecture to provide
effective caching and synchronisation of information
updates in both directions, to support
things and application scenarios that
lack reliable permanent network connectivity.
For example, there may be environments
(such as the interior of an aircraft cabin)
where network connectivity is not available
either because of non-availability, electromagnetic
interference or concerns about potential
disruption to other mission-critical or
safety-critical systems, such as the flight control
system and internal communications
infrastructure of an aeroplane.
Handheld devices might be used by maintenance
mechanics and inspectors for retrieving
lifecycle history information about an
individual aircraft part, especially when it is
mounted behind a panel or in an otherwise
inaccessible plate. Handheld devices might
CERP-IoT – Cluster of European Research Projects on the Internet of Things
59