IIC Journal of Innovation 7th Edition | Page 80

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/ IIC Journal of Innovation - 79 -