IoT Standards

The excitement that IoT offers great new possibilities to all phases of our lives is beginning to be tempered by the realization that having standards is critical and that agreeing on them takes a herculean effort. Talk to someone who remembers trying to decide between buying a VHS and Betamax VCR. The two video recording/playback formats lived side by side for many years. While each had their own merits, they were not compatible. If you had one you could not use products designed for the other. Incompatible IoT devices is a much larger problem because of the very large number of types of products and companies involved. Virtually all types of consumer products, from home entertainment to home appliances and from automobiles to retail sales can have IoT aspects to them. All manufacturing, commerce, and infrastructure will have some connection to IoT issues.

For example, plumbing may seem a long way from any IoT concern, except perhaps in remotely controlling flood gates or remotely monitoring water flow in streams. Consider that a washing machine can detect its own stuck valve and, using IoT, have the water main valve to your home shut off. This may sound far-fetched until one considers that water damage from such occurrences are a major reason for homeowner insurance claims. Without standards, it is unlikely that devices in unusual pairings will be able to communicate with each other.

Each potential vendor in the IoT space has an interest in some aspect of the standard. Any standard will likely cause some winners and some losers. Should all communications between devices go through the cloud? It would be far too cumbersome to have everyone's in-home entertainment center communicate through the cloud to dim the lights when movies start. Would there be a master list of all lightbulb serial numbers to know which ones to dim? How will the maker of the light switch dimmer interact with the changes requested by the entertainment system? In this arena, it certainly appears that communications for these devices must be local. This can be contrasted with the wide area issues of coordinating energy sources and users on the power grid.

It is difficult to get agreement on standards within a committee when each company participating has their own vested interest in standards favoring their approach. Perhaps worse than that, the number of standards committees is growing. Any major company will likely participate in competing standards committees to follow trends as well as to influence the standards being developed.

There seem to be two groups emerging to dominate the discussions: The Open Interconnect Consortium and the Allseen Alliance. Each want to be the single standard for IoT. Not surprisingly, the standards each is moving toward do not necessarily agree with each other. Much will need to happen before there is anything like a single standard. Meanwhile, products are being designed and manufactured which may not function well with designs produced after there is more agreement on standards.