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2.11 IoT Related Standardisation 103
to standardisation and include anticipation of emerging or on-going policy
making in target application areas, and thus be prepared for its potential impact
on IoT-related standardisation.
A typical example is the standardisation of vehicle emergency call services
called eCall driven from the EC [134]. Based on the objective of increased road
safety, directives were established that led to the standardisation of solutions
for services and communication by e.g. ETSI, and subsequently 3GPP. Another
example is the Smart Grid standardisation mandate M/490 [135] from the EC
towards the European Standards Organisations (ESOs), and primarily ETSI,
CEN and CENELEC.
The standardisation bodies are addressing the issue of interoperable protocol
stacks and open standards for the IoT. This includes as well expending
the HTTP, TCP, IP stack to the IoT-specific protocol stack. This is quite
challenging considering the different wireless protocols like ZigBee, RFID,
Bluetooth, BACnet 802.15.4e, 6LoWPAN, RPL, and CoAP. One difference
between HTTP and CoAP is the transport layer. HTTP relies on the Transmission
Control Protocol (TCP). TCP’s flow control mechanism is not appropriate
for LLNs and its overhead is considered too high for short-lived transactions.
In addition, TCP does not have multicast support and is rather sensitive to
mobility. CoAP is built on top of the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) and
therefore has significantly lower overhead and multicast support [45].
The conclusion is that any IoT related standardisation must pay attention
to how regulatory measures in a particular applied sector will eventually drive
the need for standardized efforts in the IoT domain.
Agreed standards do not necessarily mean that the objective of interoperability
is achieved. The mobile communications industry has been successful
not only because of its global standards, but also because interoperability can
be assured via the certification of mobile devices and organizations such as
the Global Certification Forum [136] which is a joint partnership between
mobile network operators, mobile handset manufacturers and test equipment
manufacturers. Current corresponding M2M efforts are very domain specific
and fragmented. The emerging IoT and M2M dependant industries should
also benefit from ensuring interoperability of devices via activities such as
conformance testing and certification on a broader scale.
To achieve this very important objective of a “certification” or validation
programme, we also need non ambiguous test specifications which are