New Standards and Best Practices Aim to Transform IoT, IIoT

A joint white paper by IIC and oneM2M features new architectural approaches to streamline IoT and IIoT design and complexity. (Image courtesy of Envue Telematics.)

Costs, efficiency and profitability remain key challenges as more businesses move to implement Internet of Things (IoT) and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) digital platforms. The expected growth in this arena brought together the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC), a leading membership program accelerating IIoT growth, and oneM2M, a global standards initiative, to boost collaboration and develop best practices and standards to better meet challenges.

“The IIC Industrial Internet Reference Architecture and the oneM2M technical specification both seek to address key architectural and technical issues common across industries, each with a different approach and emphasis,” said Shi-Wan Lin, cochair of IIC Technology Working Group and Architecture Task Group as well as a coeditor of the white paper. “This joint white paper by technical experts from these two communities provides an initial mapping and alignment of these two complementary reference architectures and offers guidance on how to benefit from them when implementing IIoT systems.”

A key element of the joint white paper, Advancing the Industrial Internet of Things, is the need for collaboration, which makes it essential to incorporate more than just the technology, the available solutions and their suppliers. To advance and achieve global standards and eliminate division, standardization bodies and industry alliances are needed.

“This liaison initiative highlights the strategic importance of architecture models and the need for a standardization road map for industrial IoT solutions. It provides a foundation for future collaboration on security and semantic interoperability topics,” said Ken Figueredo of InterDigital Inc, a member of the oneM2M Partnership Project and coeditor of the report. “oneM2M and the IIC are also expecting more standardization requirements to arise from new industrial use cases across the manufacturing, transportation, energy, agriculture, health care and public infrastructure sectors.”

Achieving standards will minimize the complexity for businesses implementing IoT and IIoT systems with regard to the design, development and deployment of these systems. Having such standards can enhance interoperability and reusability, thus shortening time-to-market and value creation cycles.

oneM2M identified 14 common service functions and standardized them into different groupings for a uniform API. (Image courtesy of oneM2M.)

After determining and standardizing common service functions, IIC and oneM2M created their three-layer architectural approach, the Industrial Internet Reference Architecture (IIRA), to provide aligned guidance, best practices and standards for implementation methodologies, reusable components and scalable solutions. From technical aspects to concepts and patterns, the architecture can be applied to different industrial segments to ease the process and better align producers and consumers.

This joint effort has paved the way for discussion and future collaboration efforts. According to the white paper, areas of potential exploration and evaluation include:

IoT security approaches and solutions
Enablers of semantic interoperability, such as potential frameworks for cross-domain solutions
Data models
New requirements emerging from industrial IoT use cases
Edge, fog and distributed computing approaches and solutions
Networking and connectivity solutions and best practices

To learn more about IoT growth and its challenges, check out, What IoT Can Do for You: Looking Forward and Making 5G Secure and Reliable.