Connectivity Framework
3: Connectivity Reference Architecture
A core connectivity standard shall have commitments from SDOs to build standards-based core gateways to the other core connectivity standards. This ensures syntactic interoperability between the core connectivity standards.
A core connectivity standard should support all the core functions of a connectivity framework. It should be fast, flexible, and impose minimal overhead. It should be a proven, well-established technology, and be open and extensible to future needs of the most demanding IIoT systems.
Specifically, it should meet the following technical criteria:
• the connectivity framework functional requirements described in section 4.1, within each functional domain and across functional domains,
• the non-functional requirements of performance, scalability, reliability, resilience, within and across functional domains,
• security and safety requirements within and across functional domains,
and the following business criteria:
• not require any single component from any single vendor( consistent with the internet model) and
• have readily-available, professionally-supported Software Development Kits( SDKs) from multiple vendors, ideally including both commercial and open source.
The technical and business criteria ensure that an endpoint can use a gateway to any core connectivity standard to communicate with other endpoints connected via a gateway to another core connectivity standard.
The design of specifying only a few core standards with core gateways amongst them mitigates the“ N-squared” problem( see section 3.1, Figure 3-1). The core connectivity standards bear the burden of mapping to all other core connectivity standards. Core connectivity standards allow all other domain-specific connectivity technologies( standard or non-standard) prevalent within a domain to continue to be used, while providing a pathway for an open architecture to communicate with the larger IIoT ecosystem. Domain-specific connectivity technologies will need a gateway to one of the core connectivity standards. Those gateways can be products, hardware or software, standard or not. There is a practical need to limit the number of core standards to just a few, and judiciously allow for new ones to be added, if there is clearly no significant overlap with existing core standards. Otherwise we would be back again to an N ² problem( see section 3.1, Figure 3-1) amongst the connectivity core standards.
IIC: PUB: G5: V1.0: PB: 20170228- 26-