Page 1021 - 2015 Security in Telecommunications and Information Technology

Unleashing the potential of the Internet of Things 8

URIs are widely used as generic identifiers. They can be resolved to an IP address by DNS and enable
interaction between resources over the Internet using specific protocols (e.g., hypertext transfer
protocol (HTTP)). Thus, if the IoT network infrastructure is realized by existing network
technologies, such as conventional transmission control protocol/Internet protocol (TCP/IP) based
networks, URIs can be used as a generic identifier of the IoT.
In the conventional Internet environment, the FQDN is a basic domain name scheme and works very
well with current IP networks. However, if the FQDN is used as a device identifier in the IoT, the
FQDN scheme can be a huge burden on DNS servers. Mapping of every FQDN to an IP address
requires an entry in the DNS system. Thus, using the FQDN as an identifier of the IoT devices would
increase entries in the DNS system. In addition, this scheme requires additional system updates for
authentication and billing in 3G networks. The FQDN scheme has virtually unlimited name space,
thus it does not have a limit to the number of identifiers.
IPv4/IPv6 addresses are not suitable as public identifiers because they are used as routing identifiers
in the Internet. Although IPv4/IPv6 addresses are generic identifiers, there are not enough of them to
accommodate numerous devices in the IoT (i.e., the exhaustion of identifiers can occur).

8 Common characteristics of the IoT identifier
Common characteristics of the existing identifiers can be applied to the IoT identifier. Generally, an
identifier can be used to identify subscriber, user, network element, function, network entity, or other
entity (e.g., physical or logical objects) [ITU-T Y.2091].
In addition to common characteristics of the existing identifiers, the IoT identifier has the following
additional characteristics:
– Identifying things:
An identifier can identify various kinds of things. The existing identifiers identify specific
things, but the IoT identifiers identify various kinds of things. To identify various kinds of
things and interconnect things, it is acknowledged that the Internet and the web-based
identifiers are more suitable.

– Communicating with other things:
After being identified, various types of things can communicate with computers, humans,
and other things. With communication between things, things can be interconnected with
each other.

– Connecting to networks:
Although different communication technologies and services/applications are used, things
are connected to networks directly/indirectly and always/periodically/on-demand with
identifiers.
– Huge accommodation:

Existing identifiers have a limited range of available allocation. The number of the IoT
identifiers should be large enough (may be limitless) to cover an enormous number of things.

– Interconnection:
Identifiers of things in different networks can be interconnected. Identifiers of physical things
in the physical world and identifiers of virtual things in the information world will be
interconnected.

– Diversity:
Identifiers in the physical world and the information world are different. In the physical
world, the identifiers of physical things of the IoT devices may be different according to
applied technologies.

Rec. ITU-T Y.4801/F.748.1 (10/2014) 1007