An Overview of Internet of Things Standards
As the ComputerWorld inscribed in an article that Internet was built with a concept to withstand a nuclear attack, but the inventors never imagined that household appliances could have such a severe impact on the World Wide Web. Moreover, they need to ensure that connected devices usher in any disastrous activities.
The discussion about IoT standards began in early 2013, which is regarded as far too late as the tech industry had already started to experiment with new techniques. Before the standards were even been approved officially, the tech industry won and lost a host of technological battles. Since then, various alliances were formed and now we have a few IoT standards that have started certifying products on a limited basis.
Internet of Things Standards
Recently, two of the major IoT standardization groups, the Thread Group, co-founded by Alphabet -owned Nest, and the Open Connectivity Foundation (OCF) (which is newly-formed), announced that they would collaborate to ascertain that their software would function together. Thread group is a networking protocol that promotes direct communication between devices, whereas OCF develops application level software that resides on networking protocol. So this shows that both groups are not directly competing with each other as they work on a bit distinct levels of device software.
Other than these, there are couple of other IoT standardization groups working on IoT uses in various aspects and verticals such as AllJoyn, Open Interconnect Consortium, and Industrial Internet Consortium.
Alongside, rumors started to come up that the market giants, Google and Apple may make a move toward the IoT market and develop their own set of protocols for the IoT as the organizations have already launched their mobile operating systems' latest features for managing home appliances and fitness gadgets.
The other side of this discussion is that whether we actually need these set of standards. While we are being surrounded by a bunch of innovation to bring together incompatible devices, but have we ever given a thought to whether we need it or not. Not all understand the value of these standards, but what essentially matters and needs to be looked upon is that the Internet of Things demands a ton of technology to function.
With that said, we now have a handful of standards that are developed across the sphere and it looks like that not one but more will get through and what happens next is yet to be seen. Experts say that they expect an upheaval in the upcoming year.
