Developments in IoT standards

With the impactful increase in the number of use cases, the Internet of Things (IoT) dominantly integrates ambient sensing, ubiquitous communication, intelligent analytics, and persuasive communications. A recent survey concludes for an estimate of about 50 million devices to operate by 2020 that will generate an avalanche of traffic. IoT is a relatively newer concept is not included in most of the existing standards technically. In today’s scenario, with a large number of vendors trying to supersede the field most of them are creating and deploying their own proprietary standards. These organizations are working hard not only for standardizing the hardware components but also the software services which makes communication between multiple IoT devices difficult. For easy mitigation across the different systems, the entrepreneurs are trying hard to maintain uniformity among different standards. The use of standards –

• interoperable and reduced costs
• opens ways towards new opportunities
• security and privacy for users
• allows the market to reach full potential

Standardization is not basically to solve the problem for interoperability because this can be achieved through multiprotocol gateways. IoT landscape standardization is important to reduce the gaps between protocols and thus reducing overall cost. Though there is no single body which is responsible for making standards, there are considerable efforts at the national, international and organizational level. Alliances have been formed by many domestic and multinational companies to come up with a common platform to work on. The timeline below shows a brief view of the development of IoT standards.

Timeline – IoT standards

Recent activities in IoT standardization –

• Cable labs, the leader in the field of security technologies along with NIST (National institute of standards and technologies) is now ready to provide solutions for IoT security. Recently, with several other companies cable labs put a step forward for development of security baselines for insecure IoT devices.
• Irdeto provides solution to the key challenges faced by the consumer service providers for IoT i.e. security and connectivity by launching its very new Trusted Home, that enables a secure environment beyond router.
• Zigbee alliance proudly welcomes Lutron as one of its contributing member for reliable IoT standards. The duo aims towards renderings enhanced customer experience and better quality of service.
• The Telecommunication Industry Association (TIA) joins the race for IoT standards and now focuses on delivering a global unprecedented standard for IoT cybersecurity.
• In the recently held technical plenary meeting, One M2M announces upcoming IoT specification Release 4 to support application and services such as smart grid, connected cars, home automation, and public safety and health.
• Intel and ARM are all set to create a new standard for device onboarding. The standard will offer simple solutions to reduce the complexity involved in IoT connectivity. The solution will include global roaming SIM, one global contract and fully managed services.
• NIST releases core baseline recommendations for IoT devices. A guide “A starting point for IoT device manufacturers” is to be published as a voluntary recommended cybersecurity features to be included in the network-capable devices.