Opportunities, Challenges and Practices of the Internet of Things

Opportunities

In the future, the Internet of Things will undergo three stages of development: a typical application stage, growth in scale, and full-scale development.

■    Typical applications: By integrating value chains, the Internet of Things service support platform, and existing Internet of Things applications will combine to provide end-to-end Internet of Things solutions. This will resolve some issues in social and economic life relating to environmental management, intelligent transportation, intelligent electric power, intelligent agriculture, public safety, and disaster prevention. Moreover, a cooperative model of value chains, and a development model of Internet of Things industrialization can also be created for large scale applications of Internet of Things.

■    Growth in scale: The architecture and functionality of the Internet of

Things service support platform will be continuously enhanced based on typical applications of the first stage. Through the cooperation of value chains, some new applications for the Internet of Things will be put into practice. And in the Internet of Things service support environment, universal applications oriented towards the public will be provided.  Internet of Things technologies will drive efficient and rapid growth of the information economy.

■    Full-scale development: Internet of Things technologies will penetrate into all areas and achieve full-scale development with a well-established industrial chain model. All objects will be connected through the Internet of Things, thereby achieving full connectivity and realizing the goal of an “anytime, anywhere, anyone, and anything” world.

The general form of the Internet of Things is M2M (“machine to machine,” “machine to man” or “man to machine”). In its Internet Report of 2005, the ITU points out that “for the telecommunication industry, the Internet of Things is not only an opportunity to capitalize on existing success stories—such as mobile and wireless communications—but also to explore new frontiers. In a world increasingly mediated by technology, we must ensure that the human core to our activities remains untouched. On the road to the Internet of Things, this can only be achieved through people-oriented strategies.” Therefore, along with machine-to-machine communication, focus should not be lost on machine-to-man and man-to-machine communications. Drawing on the experience of individuals, the resource advantages of a large number of mobile phone users, and operator capabilities, full machine-to-machine and man-to-machine communications can be realized. This will bring Internet connectivity to all things and objects.

The Internet of Things industry has good prospects—the M2M market is expected to generate 60 billion U.S. dollars by 2012. Presented with such a large market opportunity, operators around the world have invested heavily in the research and development of M2M. Orange, for example, has developed more than 1 million SIM cards for M2M services in Europe; Vodafone began launching M2M services in 2002 (including vehicle management, automatic meter reading, and security monitoring); and Telenor began launching M2M services in 1997 (in areas such as logistics, security, and location positioning).

Problems and Challenges

In recent years, China’s Internet of Things industry has developed rapidly, and has led the world in the development of the Internet of Things technology. However, due to the lack of unified standards, current applications of Internet of Things are independent. Without well-defined industry segmentation, numerous terminal vendors, application providers, and system integrators fail to cooperate with one another. This will impact large-scale development across the entire industry.

Furthermore, although the Internet of Things refers to the connection of physical objects, its core lies in information interconnection and convergence. Because of some existing industrial barriers, there are information islands in different fields. This has greatly hindered information interconnection and convergence, making it difficult to interconnect all things.

For the Internet of Things to be successful, a clear specification for the horizontal technical segmentation of the entire industrial chain is needed. In order to achieve large-scale development, it is necessary to specify its standards, openness, and interoperability. Currently, standardization organizations, research institutes, universities, telecom operators, equipment manufacturers, industry application providers, and terminal vendors in China are jointly working on the standardization of the Internet of Things. This will cover information sensing, data transfer, applications, and the service platform.

The industrial structure of the Internet of Things is quite complex, involving many sectors (e.g. terminal vendors, system integrators, and network operators). With production value as high as one trillion yuan, each sector (vendor or operator) within the Internet of Things industrial chain has its own strengths. Yet only through the alliance of strong sectors can the Internet of Things provide customers with complete product solutions. Standardization is important for industrial alliance, and is also the basis of system integration. Without standardization, it is impossible to achieve industrial alliance.

The Service Support Platform

A glance at M2M applications around the world shows that M2M is not widespread, and there is still a long way to go before large-scale applications become commonplace. To achieve widespread application, and to allow for information interconnection and sharing between different systems, it is necessary to build a new platform―the service support platform for the Internet of Things.

The Internet of Things service support system consists of four layers: the sensing layer, network transport layer, operation and management layer, and application layer (as shown in Figure 1). The sensing layer consists of a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN), RFID reader, and M2M terminals. The network transport layer contains various networks (GSM, CDMA, 3G networks, and fixed-line) offered by operators for the transfer of information between the sensing layer and application layer. The operation and management layer includes the operation support platform, and the operators’ Business Operation Support System (BOSS) environment. Using standard protocols, the operation support platform can access terminals and applications, providing functionality such as authentication, billing, service management, and service acceptance, so that operators can manage Internet of Things applications in a unified manner. The application layer contains a number of industrial applications that call in various service capabilities through the operation support platform in order to meet service needs.

Internet of Things applications may possess a large number of telecom capabilities (such as SMS, MMS, Location-Based Service (LBS), and call center services), or third party services and resources. Figure 2 shows the M2M architecture of ETSI TISPAN. Open and converged service capabilities greatly reduce development barriers, laying a foundation for rapid growth of the Internet of Things. This is also the generic architecture for intelligent information processing in the future. Based on such architecture, machine-to-machine, machine-to-man, and man-to-machine interaction and collaboration will be achieved, and convergence of Internet of Things applications fulfilled.

In addition, cloud computing also provides an important means of supporting flexible traffic growth and reducing application deployment costs. It addresses the issue of idle storage and computing capabilities of operators.

Network Optimization

With the expansion of Internet of Things applications, and the consequential opening up and convergence of information among different industries, existing communication systems will need to optimize their Internet of Things service models in the following ways:

■    The phone number system will need to be optimized to accommodate an expansive number of “objects”;

■    Wireless resource management will need to be optimized to reduce power consumption and to meet the mobility requirements of “objects”. For example, the uplink/downlink bandwidth required for machine-to-machine communication is quite different to that of man-to-man communication;

■    Communication security systems will need to be optimized to meet the security needs of “objects”.

Of course, the optimizations mentioned above will be implemented in line with network evolution. At present, the Internet of Things in China is in a typical application stage and has not yet found large-scale applications. In China’s telecom networks, relatively small information flow is generated by the Internet of Things, and most of it is applied in the telecom industry. Therefore, the existing communication networks in China require no great changes except the introduction of an Internet of Things service support platform.

Applications and Practices

ZTE has developed applications for the Internet of Things. It has established a department based in Tianjin which specializes in the research and development of RFID products. Its RFID solutions include a portfolio of products used for all-in-one-card systems, an information-based campus, path identification, and logistics & warehousing. ZTE also offers a variety of M2M modules that can be widely applied in the fields of vehicle-mounted terminals, wireless meter reading, transportation, household appliances, and industrial cameras.

Below are some end-to-end applications of the Internet of Things provided by ZTE and its partners:

■    Transportation: the radar-based traffic counter is used to detect traffic conditions on frequently-congested roads. It sends information about traffic congestion to the driver from a distance of 3km to 5km away by SMS or MMS, prompting them to choose another route. This alleviates traffic congestion.

■    Intelligent car parking: wireless sensors are deployed in a carpark. Each parking space is equipped with one sensor node, which detects and monitors the occupation of the space. Information about the carpark is reported periodically to a database via a wireless sensor network and then sent to vehicles. At the entrance of the parking lot, the vehicles can obtain an overall picture of vacant parking spaces and quickly find the spaces.

■    Telemedicine monitoring: in China, there are about 80 million people with heart disease. Due to limited medical facilities and staff shortages, monitoring these patients can be a challenge in many hospitals. With the Internet of Things applied in telemedicine, patients can use instruments to measure and record physiological indices such as heart beat, blood pressure, and pulse rate. This can be done at any time and sent to the expert system through the M2M platform.

■    Smart electric meter reading: a smart electric meter reading system improves the automated processes of electricity providers. With the smart electric meter, users with long-term arrears will have their electricity automatically cut off. It also records power consumption at a time specified by users to help them save electricity.

■    Greenhouse monitoring: this monitoring system collects environmental information from within a greenhouse and controls factors such as temperature and soil moisture. With this system, farmers need not stay in the greenhouse, but can determine the state of their plants at home on TV or mobile phone. In this way, they can plant cantaloupe in Wuxi City, southern Jiangsu, and mangos in China’s Northwest Xinjiang Region.

The value chain of the Internet of Things is very long. ZTE will strive to construct a standardized, open and smart Internet of Things platform that allows application developers to expand industrial service capabilities in a fast and easy manner. Ultimately, Internet of Things applications could be deployed to satisfy customers’ various personalized requirements.