Question

In order for a company's loT device to communicate with other loT-connected devices, you have to have interoperability and standards. 

Your company is developing an loT-connected device to be employed in standard kitchen appliances, such as refrigerators. Briefly list the key challenges that your company will face in the design of this device. Then explain why the lack of interoperability and standards is a significant problem for the development of such a device. 

Note: this question discusses interoperability and standards. It does NOT discuss - security per se, and just giving "security" as an answer will give you zero points.

Answer 1

Some of the challenges a company faces in IoT are

Communication - Communication is the first issue related, which means how to connect devices to the Internet with a cloud computing platform.

Security & Privacy - IoT security has always been an issue. The first challenge to consider is that IoT security and privacy are very different from the network security we know.

Flexibility and Compliance - As the IoT pattern changes continuously, we need to ensure that your product can support future technologies.

Data Collection and Processing - In addition to security and privacy, we should also carefully plan how we process all data collected. We should first evaluate the amount of data used and collected to control the size of our cloud storage and meet your platform requirements.

Research has shown significant improvements in solutions for various devices and IoT platforms over the past 6-7 years. However, each solution provides its own IoT infrastructure, devices, APIs, and data formats that lead to interoperability issues. Such interoperability issues are the consequence of many critical issues such as vendor lock-in, impossibility to develop IoT application exposing cross-platform, and/or cross-domain, difficulty in plugging non-interoperable IoT devices into different IoT platforms, and ultimately prevents the emergence of IoT technology at a large-scale.

Enabling the sharing of resources between different IoT vendors, the efforts of professional organizations, industry, and standard setting organizations have already helped IoT interoperability, that is, the ability of multiple IoT platforms from different vendors to work together.

According to the European Cluster Cluster on the Internet of Things (IERC), IoT is defined as: “a powerful global network infrastructure with self-sufficiency capabilities based on standards and interoperable communication protocols where tangible and physical objects have identity, physical attributes, and personality and use visual connections, and seamlessly integrated into the information network ”.

the demand for these various seamless collaboration solutions, i.e. IoT interoperability, is growing.

In the view of IoT providers', the lack of interoperability means that service providers are bound to the IoT device or software provided by a single provider and must adhere to it, which can present potential risks of high cost later operations, as well as product performance and stability issues [8].

The importance of the IoT interoperability has been emphasized by both academics and the industry. The industry is trying to address the challenges of interoperability by setting standardization.