Outcomes, Insights and Best Practices from IIC Testbeds: Huawei InterDigital Testbed
This article provides information and insights captured in an interview conducted by Joseph
Fontaine, Vice President, Testbed Programs at the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) with Amar
Deol, Senior Standards Manager at Huawei, and Ken Figueredo, IoT Strategy Advisor at
InterDigital Communications.
Other contributors to this article include Jiaxin (Jason) Yin, Senior Standard and Open Source
Engineer at Huawei, and Dale Seed, Senior Wireless Systems Architect, at InterDigital
Communications.
P ROFILE
stack might be discoverable and accessible
by an application linked to a completely
separate stack.
Since there are several components in any
industrial IoT (IIoT) application, it is useful to
think of these using a stack model that
applies to a complete solution. The bottom
of the stack consists of connectivity and
communications protocols, of which there
are many. Next up the stack are functions
relating to device management, security and
those that support the ability to mix-and-
match sensors and applications from a
variety of vendors. Further up the stack,
there are components that enable the
exchanging of data between separate IIoT
applications in a semantic way (semantic
interoperability). The design challenge for
any IIoT application involves a set of
individual choices up the stack, from the
lower
levels
of
connectivity
and
communications protocols all the way up to
semantic interoperability 1 .
The oneM2M standard starts by permitting
application developers to combine devices
that use different protocols. This is useful for
heterogeneous device populations. Once
that first step is overcome, developers can
continue up the stack and mix devices from
different vendors. Eventually, developers
can exchange data semantically, without
worrying about configuration tasks taking
place in the lower levels because oneM2M
service-functions take care of that
complexity.
Interoperability can be applied to all the
different layers of the stack. At the very
lowest layer, designers may be working with
devices that communicate using the
Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP).
However, there may be a deployment
requiring some CoAP devices, some Message
Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT)
devices and maybe even some devices
relying on WebSocket. Designing a custom
solution would entail building connectors
that can accommodate each of these
The intention of the Huawei-InterDigital IoT-
Platform initiative was to demonstrate
interoperability using the oneM2M™ open-
standard. This standard provides application
developers with the tools necessary to
design applications coherently up that very
stack. An example of what this means is that
a sensor attached to an application in one
1 oneM2M’s Value Proposition for IoT Application Developers (2017), https://sites.atis.org/insights/onem2ms-value-
proposition-iot-application-developers/
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