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2.11 IoT Related Standardisation 105
2.11.2 Current Situation
The current M2M related standards and technologies landscape is highly
fragmented. The fragmentation can be seen across different applied domains
where there is very little or no re-use of technologies beyond basic communications
or networking standards. Even within a particular applied sector,
a number of competing standards and technologies are used and promoted.
The entire ecosystem of solution providers and users would greatly benefit
from less fragmentation and should strive towards the use of a common set of
basic tools. This would provide faster time to market, economy of scale and
reduce overall costs.
Another view is standards targeting protocols vs. systems. Much emphasis
has been put on communications and protocol standards, but very little effort
has previously been invested in standardizing system functions or system
architectures that support IoT. Localized system standards are plentiful for
specific deployments in various domains. One such example is in building
automation and control with (competing) standards like BACnet and KNX.
However, system standards on the larger deployment and global scale are
not in place. The on-going work in ETSI M2M TC is one such approach,
but is currently limited to providing basic application enablement on top of
different networks. It should also be noted that ETSI represent one industry
— the telecommunications industry. The IoT stakeholders are represented
by a number of different industries and sectors reaching far beyond
telecommunications.
2.11.3 Areas for Additional Consideration
The technology fragmentation mentioned above is particularly evident on the
IoT device side. To drive further standardisation of device technologies in the
direction of standard Internet protocols and Web technologies, and towards
the application level, would mitigate the impacts of fragmentation and strive
towards true interoperability. Embedded web services, as driven by the IETF
and IPSO Alliance, will ensure a seamless integration of IoT devices with the
Internet. It will also need to include semantic representation of IoT device
hosted services and capabilities.
The service layer infrastructure will require standardisation of necessary
capabilities like interfaces to information and sensor data repositories,