Question 25/16 - IoT applications and services
(Continuation of Question 25/16)
Motivation In a broad perspective, the Internet of things (IoT) can be perceived as a vision with technological and societal implications.
From the perspective of technical standardization, IoT can be viewed as a global infrastructure for the information society, enabling advanced services by interconnecting (physical and virtual) things based on, existing and evolving, interoperable information and communication technologies.
Through the exploitation of identification, data capture, processing and communication capabilities, the IoT makes full use of things to offer services to all kinds of applications, whilst maintaining the required privacy.
A ubiquitous sensor network (USN) and tag-based identification are considered as two of the key enablers for the IoT.
A USN is identified as an intelligent information service infrastructure which enables an advanced e-life society. USN provides context-aware information and knowledge services which are developed by using context awareness with sensing, storing, processing and integrating situational and environmental information gathered from sensor tags and/or sensor nodes affixed to anything, even the human body. It can deliver such information and knowledge services to anyone at anywhere and anytime. The intelligent information and knowledge services provided by USN can be presented in many media types such as text, image, animated image, voice, music, and video.
USN applications and services are emerging at the moment. Situational and context-aware information and knowledge produced by USN will add value and enable business opportunities to sensor-integrated applications and services such as manufacturing and industrial fields; military, health care, environmental control and utility use management, civil engineering, precision agriculture, transportation, and so on.
A tag-based identification enables users to access multimedia information through users' electronic devices equipped with ID tag readers and communication functions. Multimedia information can be audio, text, graphic, video and other media which have various applications such as digital maps for navigation and interactive three-dimensional panoramic pictures. Users will receive the information using communication networks such as fixed or mobile networks according to their network access capabilities.
In addition, climate change has become a global agenda and ITU is taking up this challenge as a global standards organization. Study Group 16 as a technical study group in ITU T should reply on this important subject and develop standards on ICTs and climate change to better understand how ICTs can help mitigate climate change in terms of multimedia systems and services. USN is one of promising ICT solutions to mitigate climate change problems (e.g. power/energy savings, greenhouse gas emission, natural environment pollution, etc.). Sensor nodes and resulting sensor networks have to be installed at proper measurement points to sense, collect and transmit climate status. USN supports context-aware information services through processing collected climate information.
A set of technology and application domains such as USN and tag-based identification could be involved to realize various IoT services.
For example, physical sensor networks can make use of wireline or wireless technologies, a sensor network and RFID reader can be connected via various access network technologies to a global network like NGN, Internet, and mobile cell phone network. Middleware systems can be incorporated to perform intelligent and context awareness processing. Finally, various IoT applications and services will require application layer technologies such as integrated services, sensor information description and presentation, and service discovery.
As described below, there are several work items to support IoT applications and services. Hence, this Question should cover all the work items in a harmonized way.
Study items Study items to be considered include, but are not limited to:
- analysis of service and functional requirements: requirements analysis is a starting point to extract service features, required functions, and relevant attributes and attribute values from various IoT applications and services including USN and tag-based identification;
- architectural service framework: a reference framework is required to see overall architecture consisting of system and network configurations, data processing functionalities, and interface relationships due to heterogeneous application components;
- specification of application profiles: IoT applications and services have vertical characteristics and each one may have unique requirements. Each type of IoT application and service needs an application profile to define service features, processing functions, operation attributes, attribute values, etc.;
- sensor information description language: a variety of sensor information data in USN needs to be described in a standardized, machine-readable form;
- USN middleware-relevant standards: a set of relevant standards need to be developed for such middleware functions, such as sensor information gathering, filtering by various policies and rules, data comparison and analysis, data mining, context modelling language, context-awareness processing, context-aware decision and estimation, integrated management of sensor information, service integration, audio and video data transmission, and reference middleware framework;
- directory service standards: a set of relevant standards need to be developed to define a data structure for directory services, register and discovery IoT services, etc.;
- IoT identification scheme: a unique identifier needs to be assigned to each IoT node for management purposes;
- considerations on how to help measure and mitigate climate change.
Tasks Tasks include, but are not limited to:
- roadmap for relevant standards with compiling and analysing standardization requirements and work items;
- amendment with new features for existing Recommendations with regard to some of the above study items such as directory services;
- studies on service description and requirements for USN middleware;
- studies on an architectural framework for USN middleware services;
- studies on functionality profiles of IoT applications and services including USN and tag-based identification;
- studies on a sensor information description language;
- studies on a context modelling language for context awareness of USN middleware;
- studies on audio and video data transmission protocols over low-power wireless sensor network;
- studies on application interfaces among USN middleware entities;
- studies on an identification scheme of USN elements including sensor nodes;
- enhancement and maintenance of ITU T H.744, F.641, F.771, F.621;
- studies on IoT application platform for networked robots;
- studies on automatic location identification for the IoT;
- studies on application framework for the IoT.
Key work items need to be completed by 2013 to meet the time-to-market for those emerging IoT applications and services including USN and tag-based identification.
An up-to-date status of work under this Question is found in the SG 16 work programme (
http://itu.int/ITU-T/workprog/wp_search.aspx?sp=15&q=25/16).
Relationships - Recommendations
- F- and H-series Recommendations under the responsibility of SG 16
- Questions
- 2/16, 20/16, 27/16 and 28/16
- Study groups
- ITU-T SG 5 on ICT and Environment issues
- ITU-T SG 11 on NID/USN/IoT test specification issues
- ITU-T SG 13 on NGN perspective for IoT issues (including USN and tag-based identification, MOC and WoT from NGN point of view)
- ITU-T SG 17 on IoT security and directory service issues
- ITU-R SG 1 on spectrum management
- ITU-R SG 3 on radio propagation
- Other bodies
- 3GPP SA2 on M2M standards
- ETSI M2M TC on M2M standards
- ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 31 on NID standards
- ISO/IEC JTC 1WG 7 on Sensor Network standards
- IEC TC 100 on wireless power transmission
- IEEE 1451 on sensor and sensor node interface standards
- IEEE 802.15 on low-power wireless networking standards
- IETF 6LoWPAN on IPv6-based low-power networking over IEEE 802.15.4
- ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 6 on USN matters from lower to higher layers
- ZigBee Alliance on low-power sensor networking and application issues over IEEE 802.15.4 (Low Rate WPAN)
