Yes I’ve also seen plenty of similar articles 🙂 The last of them is Gartner Identifies the Top 10 Internet of Things Technologies for 2017 and 2018. What are these 10 Technologies?
- IoT Security
- IoT Analytics
- IoT Device (Thing) Management
- Low-Power, Short-Range IoT Networks
- Low-Power, Wide-Area Networks
- IoT Processors
- IoT Operating Systems
- Event Stream Processing
- IoT Platforms
- IoT Standards and Ecosystems
No real surprise, right? Simply all the things which we need to solve or address to get it running.
Well, I’d have 2 more points – Tracing & Troubleshooting and Software Defined Networking.
- Tracing & Troubleshooting
I see what it takes in VoLTE to go live, then to go from 10 thousand subscribers to 50 thousand, from 1 mil of subscribers two 2.5 mil, etc. To be able to troubleshoot effectively is really important. IoT can have quite complex infrastructure (carrier-grade deployments) and good tooling is very important. Wireshark is a good thing when it comes to simple network architecture or limited amount of messages. But here we will need much more.
Many network elements have their own embedded tracing. This is good, as it has lower impact on systems’ performance. On the other hand with higher complexity of networks we need to be able to correlate flows and messages, to be able to intelligently filter traffic and also to see it in the context of the network’s architecture. Although there can be many vendors involved in the operator’s network, we want to see all the flows from all the entities at one place.
- Software Defined Networking v2
Neither this is a new thing. But with many new networks of different types, various types of communication and huge amount of signalling and data the SDN will be crucial. The SBCs are interconnecting networks, they are responsible for connectivity, security, media, QoS, legal obligations, monitoring and statistics. To configure such an SBC is not easy. Simply flexibility implies complexity. From the administration point of view it takes time and experience. In the future all this routing among different networks (and there will be many in IoT) should be much more automated, dynamic and also robust.
As the SBC is a gateway to network is can easily become a bottle-neck. We have to be able to assign dynamically the resources, provide the QoS and dynamically change routing if needed. We can do it today on lower layers but with more new access networks, more service networks and providers the SBC will be more dynamic also on the service layer. From my point of view there is a big difference between web services and heterogeneous signalling and media network. Right now I see SBC as a critical component for T1 IoT deployments.
But let’s see in 2018 – maybe we’re wrong all of us 🙂 Your comment much appreciated.
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