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Big data - Concept and application for telecommunications 5

6 Overview of big data in the IoT

6.1 Data characteristics in the IoT
It is expected that in the future the quantity of connected things will be so huge that the IoT data will
constitute a predominant part of the data carried by networks. These IoT data include not only data collected
from things via devices and/or gateways within the IoT system and data processed within the IoT system
itself, but also data injected from sources which are external to the IoT system (e.g., Web, social networks
and industry domain specific information systems).
In order to enhance the IoT system enabling it to deal with big data challenges in the IoT environment, it is
essential to investigate application independent characteristics (i.e., common characteristics) of IoT data.
Consequently, according to the common characteristics of IoT data, the IoT system is enabled to handle the
IoT data by the means of common capabilities facilitating data operations in the IoT.
With respect to traditional data operations, operations on IoT data require additional study due to some
unique characteristics of IoT data, named here as ''IoT big data characteristics'', essentially due to the
diversity of collected IoT data types and the broad variety of application scenarios. The prominent IoT big
data characteristics are IoT data's high volume (the size of the data sets), IoT data's high variety
(heterogeneity of data types and sources) and IoT data's high velocity (the speed of data streams in and out
of the data sets). These prominent IoT big data characteristics are the main driver of the requirements study
in this Recommendation, helping to identify related common capabilities of the IoT system with respect to
the variety of concrete IoT deployments.

6.2 IoT data roles
Based on consideration of the IoT system and the IoT big data characteristics, five key IoT data roles, i.e., the
key roles which are relevant in an IoT deployment from a data operation perspective, are identified for the
IoT ecosystem as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1 – IoT data roles

– IoT data provider: The IoT data provider collects data from things, injects data processed within the
IoT system as well as data from external sources and provides them via the IoT data carrier to the
IoT data consumer (optionally, the applications provided by the IoT data application provider may
execute relevant data operations with the support of the IoT data framework provider).
– IoT data application provider: The IoT data application provider provides applications related to the
execution of IoT data operations (e.g., applications for data analysis, data pre-processing, data
visualization and data query).
NOTE 1 – The applications provided by the IoT data application provider can interact with the
infrastructure (e.g., storage cloud) provided by the IoT data framework provider through the IoT
data carrier or run on the infrastructure (e.g., scalable distributed computing platforms) provided
by the IoT data framework provider.
– IoT data framework provider: The IoT data framework provider provides general IoT data
processing capabilities and related infrastructure (e.g., storage and computing resources, data

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