This week the IP Smart Object Alliance converged in Las Vegas for a live global interop event at Networld / Interop 2009. In addition to a stand in Las Vegas with live wireless embedded sensor devices and routers, tens of companies from all over the world participated live by connecting devices from their remote sites to a visualization application server provided by SAP running in France. This event showed that 6LoWPAN, IPv6 and IPv4 devices from around the world could be globally interoperable without the use of complex gateways.
As an active IPSO promoter it was exciting to watch the interop event preperation and excitement both in Sensinode’s engineering team and at a huge range of member companies. Our CTO, Mikko Saarnivala attending the event in person. Most interesting is the wide variety of companies involved with IPSO from chip makers, network providers, backend systems, system integrators and even end-users. So congradulations to IPSO on the successful event! The alliance just hit 50 members and will have its first anniversary this summer. Next I am looking forward to a next stage in interop, where multi-vendor 6LoWPAN networks are tested over-the-air and over the backbone using the latest HC and ND specifications.
Last week the ZigBee Alliance made a ground-breaking announcement -
ZigBee Alliance Plans Further Integration of Internet Protocol Standards
What this means in practice is that future versions of ZigBee specifications will incorporate IETF 6LoWPAN and ROLL IPv6 standards. In practice the most straight-forward way to achieve this is by adapting the ZigBee Application Layer (ZAL) over UDP, as specified in http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-tolle-cap-00.txt.
I am very excited about this – and believe this is a win-win for the whole industry. This lets the ZigBee Alliance, IPSO, the IETF and the IEEE (802.15.4) work in the same direction with much greater impact on achieving the Internet of Things. My own bet was that we would see ZigBee/IP in 2010 – great that it came a year early!
According to the press release and what I have seen happening in the industry – ZigBee has received a lot of pressure from the energy industry and chip makers to take advantage of native IP technology. This recent ZigBee alliance with Homeplug surely helped the decision as well. Texas Instruments was the first chip maker to make a press release with their strong support of ZigBee’s announcement, here at Sensinode we’re proud to be TI’s 3rd party partner for IP networking -
Texas Instruments supports ZigBee Alliance plan to integrate Internet Protocol standards for smart energy applications
A very interesting new standardization effort is now taking off in ETSI. Recently the Machine-to-Machine (M2M) Technical Committee was launched, and is aiming to fill a serious gap in today’s standardization of M2M systems and sensor networks (Internet of Things!). Most ETSI information is available to the public, go to the Committee Portal and click on M2M. Recently Sensinode has joined this ETSI group to help with sensor network integration and to help as a laison to IETF 6lowpan and roll. In the EU SENSEI Project we are designing sensor networking as an integral part of the Internet, and we hope to transfer knowledge into the ETSI effort as well.
M2M is loosely defined as the autonomous monitoring and control of machines, usually across the Internet, and mainly for enterprise applications. This is very much a driving force behind the Internet of Things. Today there is very little standardization for M2M in particular. Instead M2M solutions make use of standard Internet, Cellular and Web technologies. Solutions however today are very verticalized, with a major lack of end-to-end application protocols and data representations, standardized interfaces and horizontalization. With the increased demand for remote monitoring, large smart metering deployments and the popularity of wireless embedded and sensor networks – this is a great time for standardizing an end-to-end approach.
The goals of the ETSI M2M committee include:
- To develop and maintain an end-to-end architecture for M2M.
- To indentify gaps in current standardization, and to fill those gaps.
- Work includes sensor network integration, naming, addressing, location, QoS, security, charging, management, application interfaces and hardware interfaces.
- In particular Smart Metering is a major use case, and IETF 6lowpan promising for integration.
The technical committee so-far has a strong end-to-end IP philosophy behind it, so it looks promising as a step towards IoT standardization.
I find sports, wellbeing and tourism to be really exciting, down-to-earth applications for Internet of Things technology. These are applications that touch people’s everyday lives and are easy to relate to. The ultimate sport application is of course the Olympics.
The 2008 Beijing Olympics were an incredible showcase for Internet technology. The event was 100% IPv6, included embedded IPv6 cameras, building automation systems, taxi monitoring and mobile devices for staff – the largest production IPv6 deployment to date, and an exciting IPv6 IoT experiment as well. Hats of to the Chinese organizers’ IT team, great work. Read more technical details here.
The 2014 Sochi Winter Olypics hosted in Russia, will be the ultimate showcase for embedded IPv6 and 6LoWPAN technology. Finland is known for supplying Russia with building and technology experience, and Sochi will be no exception. Snowpolis, a leading wellbeing, sport and winter technology park (where my office is) – has been elected to coordinate the Finnish effort to bid on Sochi contracts for building the sport and tourism infrastructure needed there. Sochi is currently a village in southern Russia. Almost the entire transportation, tourism and sport infrastructure needs to be built from scratch. I am excited to be working with Snowpolis in this process, on the exciting array of 6LoWPAN applications possible at Sochi. If you have ideas where low-power IPv6 could be applied at the 2014 Olympics, I’d love to hear them!
Something is bothering me. I keep hearing that ZigBee and 6LoWPAN are competing technologies. The ZigBee Alliance has taken a stand to force such a confrontation. Its like comparing apples and, well, New York 
6LoWPAN = IPv6 = The Internet
Think about it. The Internet… the most successfull, innovative, massive network ever created. Now what was that Zig thing called again? Does anyone even remember the proprietary, link-specific networking protocols from the 90s?
Here is why ZigBee is not competetive, and shouldn’t be compared to 6LoWPAN and IPv6:
- ZigBee = small-scale isolated ad-hoc networking. 6LoWPAN = massively scalable networking as an end-to-end part of the Internet, it is IPv6!
- ZigBee = limited to a single radio standard. 6LoWPAN = applicable to any low-power, low-rate wireless radio (or even wired! See Watteco). IP protocols tie together heterogeneous networks.
- The only good part of ZigBee is application protocol profiles. And guess what, there is an IETF specification for using ZigBee profiles over UDP/IP. http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-tolle-cap-00.txt
- ZigBee is not a standard, it is a special interest group. Will it be around in a few years? The IETF produces open, long-lived, standards. IPv6 will be around for 20+ years.
- Large-scale enterprise automation, M2M, metering systems etc. require end-to-end addressing, security, mobility, traffic multiplexing, reusability, maintainability, and web-services which are globally scalable… this is the kind of thing IPv6 was designed for.
I only see one option for ZigBee, and that is to get properly networked. I bet soon we’ll be seeing something called ZigBee/IP 2010.
ZigBee over UDP/IPv6
Welcome to On the Internet of Things.
The purpose of this blog, is to keep people informed on what is happening in Internet of Things standardization, technology and business from an insider’s view. I have the pleasure of watching a technical and business revolution in the Internet happen from the inside, as a day job! As an early researcher in embedded IP, and later starting the world’s first 6LoWPAN networking company Sensinode, the last decade has been extremely interesting. The great part is that this was only the beginning. Activities in the IETF, the new IPSO Alliance, and a business awakening to embedded IP and WSN technology are starting to make the Internet of Things a reality.
Through this blog I will be sharing the inside story on Internet of Things developments through my activities at Sensinode, the IETF, the IPSO Alliance, the SENSEI project, open-source projects, and a touch of common sense opinion.
Enjoy!
Zach Shelby
