IDC predicts that the worldwide installed base of Internet of Things (IoT) endpoints will grow from 14.9 billion at the end of 2016 to more than 82 billion in 2025. At this rate, the Internet of Things may soon be as indispensable as the Internet itself. Cisco has also put the value of the global IoT market at $14.4 trillion for 2022. However, the debate is still open as to how such a market value will be shared by providers of devices, apps, services, and connectivity.

Mapping the Value in IoT

So many technologies are contending to serve the IoT market segments: There are short range, medium range and long range networks and variations within each category.  Therefore, coexistence and interwork between networks will be required to avoid interference. As operators move towards 5G, these platforms need to be able to communicate with each other seamlessly.

The Wireless Broadband Alliance is working towards building a framework to make interoperability between cellular, Wi-Fi and IoT networks a reality. The initial step is to examine business cases for IoT to see how revenues might be portioned out. The potential variety of uses and configurations makes this undertaking complex: for example, some IoT applications may only send a few (but vital) bytes of data per day, whereas others may broadcast almost continuously. The value is also moving away from access (increasingly, a commodity) to the applications, meaning that network connectivity should also seek to include value-added components of identity and service management.

IoT Connectivity Use Cases

The top three market areas for IoT connectivity are consumer/home, transport, and energy, with the leading categories of applications being automotive, asset tracking, fleet management, and security systems. Notable use cases include:

  • Connected Product Quality Analysis (industrial sensors, etc.)
  • Operations Asset and Material Tracking
  • Real-Time Asset Health Monitoring
  • Industrial Process Automation
  • Smart Outdoor Lighting
  • Smart Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC)

Wi-Fi connectivity also has a specific role to play in enabling the small trilogy, as WBA puts it, of appliances, entertainment, and lighting.

Mapping Market Needs and Technologies

Communications requirements for these applications vary considerably. Smart metering needs city-wide coverage; while home applications require indoor coverage within a . Medical imaging means transporting large volumes of data, but an industrial actuator control may only need very short data transfers. Some devices, like off-site sensors must have long battery life, whereas other smart appliances take their power from the power grid.

Different wireless access technologies tend to address different IoT requirements, and monetization must be planned accordingly. For example:

  • Wi-Fi is currently the only choice for high throughput applications with reasonable coverage, although compared to other technologies, it comes with higher cost and power consumption.
  • When wide-area network coverage with high scalability is required, such as in smart city applications, LPWAN technologies are often more suitable.
  • IEEE 802.15.4 is well adapted to large number of devices in a network for which low throughput, low cost, and low power are the main requirements, like home automation.
  • High reliability and throughput requirements, coupled with those for low cost and low power (home healthcare, for instance), may be best met by BT and BLE.
  • WiGig is best suited for applications with very high throughput, and low latency, such as industrial control and machine vision systems.

Source: IoT New Vertical Value Chains & Interoperability White Paper, March 2017, WBA

Enabling Interoperability

There are many different IoT market segments growing at different pace; some markets have existed for a while and some are new. These solutions and devices catering to specific markets have been developed in silos; as a result, different solutions do not necessarily interwork and in most cases, are not scalable as the market grows.

Such fragmented solutions hinder the realization of the true economic value of IoT where billions of devices with variable levels of capability, connect and communicate with one another regardless of the device manufacturers, band, operating system, chipset, or physical transport used.

To enable collaboration and interworking (interoperability) among devices and services developed for the same different market segments a standardized connectivity middleware is required which provides a common method for discovery, service interaction and a common data model for all device types, irrespective of underlying physical transport.

The IoT is set to trigger a diversification in terms of the endpoints being connected to the wireless network. Compared to earlier mobile broadband tailored offers where devices are assumed to have some display and user input capabilities, many of the constrained devices used in IoT will have limited Input/Output capabilities such that conventional web based authentication and/or splash page acknowledgement of terms and conditions will inhibit IoT connectivity solutions.

The work the WBA has delivered from a Passpoint/Next Generation Hotspot perspective in terms of automated authentication is directly applicable to IoT. However, the current definition of the on-boarding solution in terms of On-line Signup Service and its reliance on displaying OSU providers and manual user selection looks to be poorly suited to IoT use cases.

Gaps identified and Next Steps

The WBA has analyzed the remaining gaps to enable proper seamless onboarding, interoperability and roaming between those IoT networks.

There is an opportunity for the WBA to deliver new roaming capability that simplifies roaming deployments and accelerates the adoption of unlicensed connectivity solutions by the IoT ecosystem. Best practice for using WRIX recommendations as they relate to Usage Data Record handling for IoT can help optimize the ability to support massive numbers of low cost IoT sensors. This may include looking at security perspectives associated with these higher layer services, for example, examining how the WBA can define enhanced capabilities to couple device based access authentication with IoT service-based authentication and security.

From a connectivity perspective, some IoT use cases drive requirements for enhanced service assurance and reliability. Hence, there is an opportunity to examine on-going QoS work, and to be able to describe best practice aspects of Wi-Fi system configurations necessary to address support of time critical communications, service reliability and service outage avoidance. From a mobility and multi-homing perspective, enhanced requirements associated with IoT should also be addressed. Work on IoT will broaden to include mobility across non-cellular access types.

For IoT roaming and interoperability to flourish, existing technologies should evolve and adapt to cope with IoT broad requirements. Wi-Fi has been an industry reference in developing itself to become more secure, seamless and interoperable leveraging on industry consensus. These lessons should be taken into the IoT scope.

More details about the work done by the WBA can be found in the white paper “Source: IoT New Vertical Value Chains & Interoperability”, March 2017, WBA