Page 213 - 2015 Security in Telecommunications and Information Technology

Unleashing the potential of the Internet of Things 3

F.747.3(13)_F04
Figure 4 – Overview of the shopping support service sequence

8 Requirements for UNR-PF

8.1 Abstraction of functionality
It is required that UNR-PF provides a standardized and abstracted interface for controlling as well
as receiving results from USN nodes. That is, from application point of view, UNR-PF provides
access to a set of abstracted functionalities instead of raw USN nodes.
One of the most simple use cases of UNR-PF is collaboration among sensor networks and robots. A
sensor network measures phenomena in the real world, notifies them to one or more applications,
and then the application commands actuator devices, such as robots and smartphones, to interact
with people. Such collaboration may be performed by USN, without UNR-PF, when treating robots
as one of the "sensor nodes" with actuator facility. However, by the abstraction of functionality
provided by UNR-PF, this can be realized in a much simpler way.
Consider the example shown in Figure 5. Here, based on the sensing result, a person is approaching
a dangerous construction area, a robot warns the person. In order to warn the person, a) a mobile
robot can approach the person and give a warning, or b) a nearby loudspeaker can warn the person.
From the viewpoint of the effect, i.e., to let the person know that he/she is approaching a dangerous
area, these two devices perform equivalent services. Dangerous spots change every day. If the
application is coded to use a navigation robot and if there are no robots available nearby, the
customer would not receive a warning. However, if the application is programmed to utilize the
"alert" functionality, then the system would search for a device that can provide such functionality
and choose it based on resource availability. This is also useful from the point that applications are
not bound to a certain device at the time when it was coded. The application can then continue to
provide service without change even though the devices have changed, if they provide the same
kind of functionality.

Rec. ITU-T Y.4106/F.747.3 (03/2013) 199