A Practical Guide to Using the Industrial Internet Connectivity Framework
INTRODUCTION
The Industrial Internet of Things( IIoT) is a vast, expanding space. The Industrial Internet Consortium’ s( IIC) primary mission is to resolve the resulting confusion and thus guide the industry. The IIC developed the Industrial Internet Connectivity Framework( IICF) to help designers understand the many standards and choose the right one for their applications.
The IICF focuses on the layers above the network packet exchange. It offers profound insights into architecture, standards, and use cases. It also presents a way to build an expansive IIoT network in the future by linking a few“ core connectivity standards” that address different regions of the connectivity space.
This paper first outlines the IICF’ s key insights into system architecture, including the newly-defined IIoT connectivity stack. With that architecture, we explain why the IICF sorts the various standards into the stack based on their provided interoperability. Finally, the IICF offers deep analysis of six key standards and technologies: DDS 1, OPC UA 2, oneM2M 3,
RESTful HTTP 4, MQTT 5, and CoAP 6. There are of course many others; the IIC chose these because they have the greatest traction.
The most surprising conclusion: the IIoT space is so big that the connectivity technologies essentially do not overlap. Thus, by understanding the use cases, architectures and target end users, it is possible to select a best-candidate connectivity standard for most problems.
Finally, the paper then distills the IICF results into a simple tool that designers can use to select the right technology. The tool is a simple set of yes-or-no questions that assess the fit for each technology, as well as technical and business justification for those questions.
THE IIOT SPACE AND THE IICF
The Internet of Things( IoT) combines many technologies, encompasses vast use cases, and attracts vendors of all sorts who want to join the fray. This generates confusion, nowhere more apparent than in its most important aspect: connectivity.
1
The Data Distribution Service( DDS) is a series of standards managed by the Object Management Group( OMG), https:// portals. omg. org / dds /
2
OPC Unified Architecture( OPC UA) is a standard managed by the OPC Foundation, https:// opcfoundation. org
3 oneM2M is a standard managed by the oneM2M consortium, http:// www. onem2m. org /. OPC UA is also known as IEC 62541
4
The Hypertext Transfer Protocol( HTTP) is a standard, RFC 7231, managed by the Internet Engineering Task Force( IETF). https:// tools. ietf. org / html / rfc7231
5
MQ Telemetry Transport( MQTT) is a standard managed by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards( OASIS). http:// mqtt. org /
6
The Constrained Application Protocol( CoAP) is a standard, RFC 7252, managed by IETF. https:// tools. ietf. org / html / rfc7252
- 72- September 2017