Page 104 - 2015 Security in Telecommunications and Information Technology

3 Unleashing the potential of the Internet of Things

Appendix I

Representative use cases of the IoT

(This appendix does not form an integral part of this Recommendation.)

This appendix describes some representative use cases of the IoT, which are abstracted and classified
based on application use cases within application domains or across multiple application domains.

I.1 Video surveillance
Video surveillance is a typical class of use cases present in numerous IoT applications. For example,
in smart city applications, video cameras are used to watch people's movements for city safety
purposes. In pollution supervision, video surveillance is used to watch whether polluted water flows
out of a factory. Hospitals use video surveillance to watch the status of a patient remotely.

Video surveillance typically requires a large number of resources, such as high communication
bandwidth for transferring video, a large amount of storage resources for keeping copies of video and
powerful processors for searching and processing video.

I.2 Emergency alerting

Emergency alerting is abstracted from a large number of use cases, such as rescue message
transmission when a patient heart disease occurs, alerting message transmission before a vehicle fails
to work normally or after that, when a traffic accident happens, and alerting message transmission
when blood pressure exceeds a threshold value.
Such use cases require high priority and reliable data transport with minimized time delay and also
require device-initiated communication capabilities.

I.3 Data acquisition

This class of use cases includes a number of use cases, such as gas metering, water metering and
quality monitoring, electricity metering, bus ticket terminal data uploading, etc. In these use cases,
data communications happen at regular time intervals.

These use cases require mechanisms for periodical data transmission. The transmission task may be
activated automatically under a given policy. Normally, in most of these use cases, the throughput of
data transmission is low.

I.4 Remote control

This class of use cases includes use cases within a number of application domains, such as home
automation, manufacturing and intelligent transport systems (ITS). In these use cases, the IoT
application requires the capability for the user to control devices remotely.

For this class of use cases, data communications for controlling remote devices are not continuous
and do not necessarily happen at regular time intervals. These use cases require mechanisms to
establish connectivity between controllers and remote devices initiated by controllers or devices only
when data transmission is required.

90 Rec. ITU-T Y.4100/Y.2066 (06/2014)