Charter

Description

The Technology Working Group provides a forum for the exchange of ideas relating to technology matters in the Internet of Things, primarily focussing on those technologies and architectures that are emerging from the research community and that will soon be ready for exploitation by product/service developers in real applications/services and secondly supporting research in disruptive and gap technologies and architectures. By sharing viewpoints between global IoT technology experts and stakeholders at an early stage in the evolution of IoT architectures and technology solutions, the Technology Working Group aims to influence and harmonise future technical IoT activities.

Goals

The specific goals for the Technology Working Group are:

• To enable interactions on technical architectures and challenges between the IoT research community and potential users of the technologies
• To encourage the emergence of transversal, rather than vertical silo-based, solutions for IoT
• To identify impediments, whether research or technology implied, regulatory, standards, economic, societal, etc. to global technical solutions. Detailed discussions of the implications of some of these impediments will be carried out in the other Forum WGs

While the main focus is on technology that is nearly ready to be transferred from the research lab to deployable systems, the WG will also expose future technical directions for IoT through identification of ideas that are still at a very early stage of development.

Scope

For IoT Architectures, the overall aim is to reduce fragmentation and promote coherency among the various organisations that are involved in IoT architecture development. Relevant activities include:

• Design and evolution of the IoT reference model

• Interaction, collaboration and coordination with focussed international IoT research activities in EU, China, Japan, USA, Korea, Australia, etc.
• Contribution to Future Internet activities where IoT is an important architectural component

There is a diversity of IoT Technologies where the Technology WG will aim to exchange ideas, including:

• Efficient communications, from novel radio technologies to optimised networking solutions
• Semantic frameworks for information extraction and description of IoT services and objects
• Advances in resource-constrained platforms for improved energy and resource management
• Management frameworks to facilitate provisioning, deployment and operation of heterogeneous  IoT devices and services
• Cross-domain solutions to enable horizontalised and federated operation of IoT systems with complex ownership regimes
• Service enablers to support application development and business process integration
• Cybersecurity approaches to address cyber threats to real world deployments of IoT systems
• Privacy enhancement techniques to protect individuals’ information
• Accounting Frameworks to support commercial services and audit trails

The Technology WG will also address Standardisation and Regulation, and in particular:

• Obtain briefings on current global activities
• Identify gaps where future harmonisation is desirable

The WG will also assign some time to identifying future trends and potential breakthroughs, including

• Horizon scanning to identify IoT technologies that may be significant in the future

• Identification of potentially disruptive technologies

Criteria for success

The success of the Technology Working Group will be measured by three criteria:

• Active involvement is required from a range of stakeholders with an interest in the technical evolution of IoT. This includes representatives of:
• The international IoT research community
• Organisations that are capable of exploiting the results of the research in products/services
• Organisations which are developing technology for the IoT, and technologies on which the IoT is dependant (e.g. Internet, wireless communications, application and service enablers)
• Funding agencies that can support the transfer of technology
• Policy makers who need to get early visibility of technical issues that may have broader societal/economic implications
• The production of high quality outputs. While attendance and direct participation in the WG is the preferred interaction model, the WG needs to communicate the results of its interactions with a broader audience through the production and dissemination of white papers and briefing notes
• The quality of technical interactions. The WG requires the contributions to be of sufficient quality to sustain informed discussions and to encourage international participation. The technical interactions must be exposed to and valued by organisations that are external to the IoT Forum

Membership

The Technology Working Group will be organised to encourage the participation from the following types of organisations:

• System developers that are developing IoT-based applications and services. The Technology WG will provide these stakeholders with detailed technical insight into global developments in the IoT research community and will enable them to communicate their opinions on key technical challenges from real world experiences
• Members of the research community, whether universities, research institutes or commercial organisations. These parties will benefit from discussions with the breadth of international stakeholders involved with the WG
• Funding authorities will be interested to observe international activities and assess the areas where further funding, at international or national level, would be of benefit to the realisation of their strategic objectives for IoT
• Policy makers will wish to understand how IoT technology is advancing and will benefit from being able to discuss the potential policy implications of technical developments with experts across the IoT domain
• Standardisation bodies will be interested to see emerging topics/trends for future standardisation and will benefit from the opportunity for informal discussions prior to the formal standards processes