Blog: IoT and Edge Computing Standardisation Challenges and Beyond
Within the context of the IoT Week 2022, AIOTI hosted a session with industry representatives, standardization organisations and with the European Commission to discuss the challenges of IoT and Edge Computing standardization and trying to share what the future of the sector will look like.
Speakers of the session: Moderator: Georgios Karagiannis, Huawei and AIOTI WG Standardisation Chair, Ray Walshe, EUOS, Rolf Riemenschneider, European Commission, DG Connect, Marco Carugi, ITU-T SG20 Senior Consultant, François Coallier, ISO, Mirja Kühlewind, Chair of the IETF Internet Architecture Board, Ericsson, Enrico Scarrone, ETSI TC M2M Chair/TIM.
The expansion of the IoT and edge computing landscape has brought opportunities but also new challenges. Standards have an essential role in the IoT and edge computing systems. Having a roadmap of IoT standardization can enhance the technical issues that have to be addressed and resolved. The role of standardisation in interoperability solutions is key, both by allowing a formalised support to various implementations, and by ensuring a consolidation of the options available so that the interoperability technical landscape is not a jungle of competing solutions. In particular, the value that IoT can provide, will be based on agreements that enables the interoperability of systems across domains, creating a network effect. The agreement represents a standard whether it is a formal or a de-facto standard.
The session developed around the discussion of EC policies and regulations that will impact the IoT and Edge computing standardization, on the up-to-date IoT and edge computing standardization challenges and what is coming next, and on the key SDO specification activities focusing on solving IoT and Edge computing challenges.
This participated discussion generated recommendation to research projects, such as EU funded research projects, on solving open IoT and edge computing standardisation challenges. It also provided support SDOs to define next steps in IoT and/or edge computing standardisation activities. And finally, it culminated in recommendations for synchronization between SDOs on IoT and edge computing activities.
The event moderated by the AIOTI WG Standardisation Chair, Georgios Karagiannis (Huawei), gave the opportunity to highlight the work done by that group with the recently published High Priority IoT Standardisation Gaps and Relevant SDOs Report.
On the impact of SDOs on EU funded research and innovation projects, the following comments were collected:
- It is about synergy, in certain situations, SDOs are ahead and provide input for research, in other situations SDOs receive feedback from research on topics under standardisation;
- EUOS and HSbooster.eu (Horizon Europe Standardisation booster) are initiated to consider and focus on the synergies between SDOs and EU funded research projects;
- Outputs from EU funded projects focusing on standardisation challenges can be discussed within relevant industry associations, e.g., AIOTI.
The deployment of data spaces will require the support from IoT and Edge computing technologies. However, for the same interfaces required to access and distribute information in data spaces, specifications from different SDOs can be used. On the question on approaches to come to synergies on these specifications developed by different SDOs used for the same interface, the following comments were collected:
- The concept of MIMs (Minimum Interoperability Mechanisms) can help but cannot be considered as a final solutions; MIMs can be seen as “minimum” and will likely become obsolete in their content, in the long term. It is more a matter of adopting a methodology and a framework (around building blocks) that enable diversities to communicate and be understood and interwork, rather the adoption of a minimum set on a reference point;
- Another opinion is that a synergy can be reached on the vision required to assure interoperability; And it is not useful to find synergies and convergence to a particular protocol specification;
Important as well to consider in this synergy discussions on targeting interoperability as well the assumptions and domains (e.g., cross-domain) were the interoperability requirement needs to be assured.