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106 Internet of Things Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda
discovery and directory services and other mechanisms that have already been
identified in projects like SENSEI [137], IoT-A [138], and IoT6. Current efforts
in ETSI M2M TC do not address these aspects.
The IoT will require federated environments where producers and consumers
of services and information can collaborate across both administrative
and application domains. This will require standardized interfaces
on discovery capabilities as well as the appropriate semantic annotation to
ensure that information becomes interoperable across sectors. Furthermore,
mechanisms for authentication and authorization as well as provenance of
information, ownership and “market mechanisms” for information become
particularly important in a federated environment. Appropriate SLAs will
be required for standardisation. F-ONS [141] is one example activity in the
direction of federation by GS1. Similar approaches will be needed in general
for IoT including standardized cross-domain interfaces of sensor based
services.
A number of IoT applications will be coming from the public sector. The
Directive on Public Sector Information [142] requires open access to data.
Integration of data coming from various application domains is not an easy
task as data and information does not adhere to any standardized formats
including their semantics. Even within a single domain, data and information
is not easily integrated or shared. Consideration of IoT data and information
integration and sharing within domains as well as between domains need, also
be considered at the international level.
Instrumental in a number of IoT applications is the spatial dimension. Standardisation
efforts that provide necessary harmonization and interoperability
with spatial information services like INSPIRE [143] will be the key.
IoT with its envisioned billions of devices producing information of very
different characteristics will place additional requirements on the underlying
communications and networking strata. Efforts are needed to ensure that
the networks can accommodate not only the number of devices but also the
very different traffic requirements including delay tolerance, latency and reliability.
This is of particular importance for wireless access networks which
traditionally have been optimized based on a different set of characteristics.
3GPP, as an example, has acknowledged this and has started to address
the short term needs, but the long term needs still require identification and
standardisation.