Comm. Smart Cities and IoT supplement Smart Cities and IoT | Página 30

Smart public sector

ITU agrees to establish IoT committee headed by UAE
representative
At the beginning of July, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU)
agreed to create a new research committee for the Internet of Things during
the consultative group meeting for the
telecommunication standardisation
sector. The focus is on implementing
the Internet of Things to smart cities
and communities in order to meet the
needs of standardisation of the Internet of Things’ technologies.
This will be achieved by creating a single platform combining engineers and experts from industry, telecom operators, ITU member
states and concerned organisations, to exchange visuals, examine
the challenges and solutions while coming up with recommendations and unified global standards in this field.

The United Arab Emirates was nominated for the presidency of
the committee, with Engineer Nasser Al Marzouqi, representative of
the UAE at the ITU as the chairman of the committee. Saudi Arabia,
Russia, Japan, Spain, South Korea, Argentina, Italy, and China were
all nominated as vice-chairmen of the committee, reflecting the
great interest by ITU member states in the work of the new research
committee.
The ITU defines the Internet of Things as “a global infrastructure
for information acquisition, enabling advanced services through
the interconnection of things (physical and virtual), based on information and communications technologies, operating on existing
and evolving technologies. The things are objects of the material
world (material things) or from the information world of (virtual
things), with the potential to be identified and incorporated into
telecommunications networks.

ITU establishes IoT study
group
ITU members have established a new ITU-T Study Group to address
the standardisation requirements of Internet of Things technologies, with an initial focus on IoT applications in smart cities.
The new group is titled “ITU-T Study Group 20: IoT and its applications, including smart cities and communities”. It will be responsible
for international standards to enable the coordinated development
of IoT technologies, including machine-to-machine communications and ubiquitous sensor networks. The group will develop
standards that leverage IoT technologies to address urban-development challenges. A key part of this study will be the standardisation of end-to-end architectures for IoT and mechanisms for the interoperability of IoT applications and datasets employed by various
vertically oriented industry sectors.
The deployment of IoT technologies is expected to connect tens
of billions of devices to the network by year 2020, impacting nearly
every aspect of our daily lives. IoT is contributing to the convergence
of industry sectors, with utilities, healthcare and transportation
among the many sectors with a stake in the future of IoT technologies. The new ITU-T Study Group provides the specialised IoT standardisation platform necessary for this convergence to rest on a
cohesive set of international standards.

Huawei awarded accolade
for smart city solutions
Huawei was honoured by the Middle East Excellence Awards Institute with the award of ‘Smart Solution Service Provider Excellence’
at the 21st GCC Smart Government and Smart Services Conference.
The annual awards ceremony, which took place in Dubai, saw
Huawei presented with the accolade in recognition of its work
providing leading