Page 550 - 5G Basics - Core Network Aspects

1 Applications

NOTE 3 – Technologies used for interaction between data-capturing devices and data-carrying devices or data
carriers include radio frequency, infrared, optical and galvanic driving.
– Sensing and actuating device: A sensing and actuating device may detect or measure information
related to the surrounding environment and convert it into digital electronic signals. It may also
convert digital electronic signals from the information networks into operations. Generally, sensing
and actuating devices form local networks communicate with each other using wired or wireless
communication technologies and use gateways to connect to the communication networks.
– General device: A general device has embedded processing and communication capabilities and
may communicate with the communication networks via wired or wireless technologies. General
devices include equipment and appliances for different IoT application domains, such as industrial
machines, home electrical appliances and smart phones.

7 Fundamental characteristics and high-level requirements of the IoT

7.1 Fundamental characteristics
The fundamental characteristics of the IoT are as follows:
– Interconnectivity: With regard to the IoT, anything can be interconnected with the global
information and communication infrastructure.
– Things-related services: The IoT is capable of providing thing-related services within the constraints
of things, such as privacy protection and semantic consistency between physical things and their
associated virtual things. In order to provide thing-related services within the constraints of things,
both the technologies in physical world and information world will change.
– Heterogeneity: The devices in the IoT are heterogeneous as based on different hardware platforms
and networks. They can interact with other devices or service platforms through different networks.
– Dynamic changes: The state of devices change dynamically, e.g., sleeping and waking up, connected
and/or disconnected as well as the context of devices including location and speed. Moreover, the
number of devices can change dynamically.
– Enormous scale: The number of devices that need to be managed and that communicate with each
other will be at least an order of magnitude larger than the devices connected to the current
Internet. The ratio of communication triggered by devices as compared to communication triggered
by humans will noticeably shift towards device-triggered communication. Even more critical will be
the management of the data generated and their interpretation for application purposes. This
relates to semantics of data, as well as efficient data handling.

7.2 High-level requirements

The following provide high-level requirements which are relevant for the IoT:
– Identification-based connectivity: The IoT needs to support that the connectivity between a thing
and the IoT is established based on the thing's identifier. Also, this includes that possibly
heterogeneous identifiers of the different things are processed in a unified way.
– Interoperability: Interoperability needs to be ensured among heterogeneous and distributed
systems for provision and consumption of a variety of information and services.
– Autonomic networking: Autonomic networking (including self-management, self-configuring, self-
healing, self-optimizing and self-protecting techniques and/or mechanisms) needs to be supported
in the networking control functions of the IoT, in order to adapt to different application domains,
different communication environments and large numbers and types of devices.

– Autonomic services provisioning: The services need to be able to be provided by capturing,
communicating and processing automatically the data of things based on the rules configured by
operators or customized by subscribers. Autonomic services may depend on the techniques of
automatic data fusion and data mining.

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