Question 4/20​ - IoT applications and services including end user networks and interworking

Motivation
Developments in Internet of Things (IoT) technologies have wide impacts, especially in enhancing the end user experience by advanced networking and services, which will form part of smart user environments through the collaboration among humans and things. IoT applications and services receive more importance in the whole process of communications such as configuration of resources, provision of capabilities and management. Through the exploitation of identification, data capture, processing and communication capabilities, IoT makes full use of “things” to offer services to all kinds of applications, whilst maintaining the required privacy and security.

IoT provides context-aware information and knowledge services, which are developed by using context awareness with sensing, storing, processing and integrating situational and environmental information gathered from sensor tags and/or sensor nodes affixed to anything, even the human body. It can deliver such information and knowledge services to anyone, anywhere and at anytime. Ubiquitous Sensor Networks applications and services are emerging at the moment.

Situational and context-aware information and knowledge produced by IoT will add value and enable business opportunities to sensor-integrated applications and services such as manufacturing and industrial fields; military, health care, environmental control and utility use management, civil engineering, agriculture, transportation, and so on.

End user networks with identification schemes for various devices/sensors including RFID tags enable end users to cooperate by sharing services and resources for interactions among humans and things using awareness features to support specific IoT applications and services. This is achieved by organizing a collaboration group and sharing media via fixed/mobile access networking technologies and in an end user environment.

Question
This Question is tasked to focus on interworking aspects between different networks and services. Also, this Question is tasked to focus on the interworking aspects related to all vertical and horizontal layers, to facilitate seamless services among heterogeneous IoT environments.

There are several work items to support IoT applications and services including end user networks and interworking. Hence, this Question should cover all the work items in a harmonized way.

Study items to be considered include, but are not limited to:

• Analysis of service and functional requirements: Requirements analysis is a starting point to extract service features, required functions, relevant attributes and also to attribute values from various IoT applications and services, including end user networks and interworking;
• Specification of application profiles: IoT applications and services have vertical characteristics and each one may have unique requirements. Each type of IoT application and service needs an application profile to define service features, processing functions, operation attributes, attribute values, etc.;
•  Sensor information description language: A variety of sensor information data in IoT needs to be described in a standardized, machine-readable form to support semantics;
• IoT middleware-relevant standards: A set of relevant standards need to be developed for such middleware functions, such as sensor information gathering, filtering by various policies and rules, data comparison and analysis, data mining, context modelling language, context-awareness processing, context-aware decision and estimation, integrated management of sensor information, service integration, audio and video data transmission, and reference middleware framework;
• Directory service standards: A set of relevant standards need to be developed to define a data structure for directory services, register and discovery of IoT services;
• End user networks: This requires networking and service solutions, including middleware to provide the connectivity and services with global networks through M2M communications capabilities and multiple interfaces for various end devices, sensors and tags;
• Interworking in IoT: Interworking models are needed to support end-to-end transparent IoT applications and services;
• Security, privacy and trust of IoT systems, services and applications;
• Quality of service (QoS) and end-to-end performance for IoT and its applications;
• High-layer protocols and middleware for IoT systems and applications;
• Collaboration with which standards developing organizations (SDOs) would be necessary to maximize synergies and harmonize existing standards related to this field work?