IoT: Driving endless possibilities

Professor Rahim Tafazolli, Director of Centre for Communications Systems Research, University of Surrey, painted a vivid picture of IoT enhancing quality of life while providing new revenue opportunities for a host of enterprises.

Professor Tafazonlli says “Probably, the most exciting and long-term IoT application is that sensors will detect our state of the mind and mood. Accordingly, the actuators will respond to the current state of the mind and mood of the person and change the environment. For example, if you are happy, sad or tired, appropriate music is played and the ambient light will change according to settings you have configured. That is effectively minimizing the boundary between the cyber world and physical world. It is a very exciting but long-term application.”

He also believes that smart metering needs to evolve beyond simply reading gas meters, electricity meters, or other utility meters; it must also provide intelligence for smart homes. It can control appliances and provide information about security and energy efficiency at homes. Smart metering, though simple, will evolve into smart city applications which can help manage the transportation and security surveillance in the city amongst many other applications, because information and location-based services are extremely important applications that IoT can provide.

By Linda Xu&Joyce Fan

The Internet of Things (IoT) concept has been broadened to cover a plethora of technologies, applications and services. According to IDC, IoT and the technology ecosystem surrounding it are expected to be a USD8.9 trillion market in 2020. IoT will be fully pervasive, interactive and intelligent. Professor Rahim Tafazolli, Director of Centre for Communications Systems Research, University of Surrey, painted a vivid picture of IoT enhancing quality of life while providing new revenue opportunities for a host of enterprises.

Integrating with senses

WinWin: From your perspective, what would be the most exciting and anticipated IoT application in our business and daily life?

Rahim Tafazolli: Probably, the most exciting and long-term IoT application is that sensors will detect our state of the mind and mood. Accordingly, the actuators will respond to the current state of the mind and mood of the person and change the environment. For example, if you are happy, sad or tired, appropriate music is played and the ambient light will change according to settings you have configured. That is effectively minimizing the boundary between the cyber world and physical world. It is a very exciting but long-term application.

There are many short-term applications. For example, smart metering is a very clear business case. Big sensors like connected cars are happening now. Medical applications are using sensors to monitor what is going on in your body. For instance, medicine capsules equipped with sensors are already in use to help doctors better understand the effectiveness of the medicine.

WinWin: Sensor fusion is increasingly becoming the secret sauce for the IoT. How can sensor fusion technologies seamlessly integrate with people's five senses?

Rahim Tafazolli: Currently sensor fusion enables context awareness. It gives enough information about the user context for us to determine whether the user is standing up, walking, lying down or in a meeting. That kind of information is easily obtained by sensor fusion in the smart phone. We have proved the technology is very accurate in measuring the electron magnetic field together with gyrometer and acceleratormeters to determine the context of a user. Many years ago, we performed experiments in which we detected and monitored subject’s states of mind. It was a large European Union funded project that had us working with medical specialists and psychologists. We detected very simple states of the mind like happiness, sadness, tiredness and stress by measuring the temperature, blood pressure and heart beat etc. We were able to process the data to successfully determine the state of the mind of a person so that we could make informed modifications by playing music for example to change the mood from stress to relaxation.

Mining gold from IoT

WinWin: Do you see any specific industries that either have been or are being revolutionized by IoT technologies in terms of their ICT infrastructure and business model?

Rahim Tafazolli: I wouldn't say any industries have been revolutionized or have changed business models because of IoT. Most of the IoT applications are very application specific at the moment and they are mainly provided by SMEs like two-men or three-men companies. I believe these applications will not become global and will always be a niche market unless we standardize IoT. If we have globally accepted standards in IoT, it could have potential to revolutionize companies or change business models. The basic services like smart metering can evolve. Connected cars will become an important part of every country’s infrastructure. So connectivity of cars cannot be overlooked as we are connecting our mobile devices to the Internet. I believe it is a very important application that now needs to become a part of long- and short-term planning.

WinWin: What kind of business opportunities can be seized in the era of IoT?

Rahim Tafazolli: There are many. The user context is extremely important: where is the user, what are they doing, what do they need, and what is their profile? All this can be obtained from the fusion of different sensor technologies. Based on the user context and user environment, you can provide an appropriate service or resource for communication. This is becoming embedded as part of the requirements and technologies for the communication systems. One very clear business case, as I mentioned, smart metering is a simple form of IoT. Most national governments plan to completely deploy smart metering throughout residential zones before 2020.

But smart metering needs to evolve beyond simply reading gas meters, electricity meters, or other utility meters; it must also provide intelligence for smart homes. It can control appliances and provide information about security and energy efficiency at homes. I believe that smart metering, though simple, will evolve into smart city applications which can help manage the transportation and security surveillance in the city amongst many other applications, because information and location-based services are extremely important applications that IoT can provide.

Another important area is telemedicine and healthcare. If you look at countries like the UK, the cost of national healthcare services is huge. If we could remotely monitor people's health, they wouldn’t have to go to hospital and consume huge resources. It can even predict the healthy condition of people and take measures proactively. I think that is probably the third biggest market.

WinWin: Are business models changing in traditional industries like manufacturing, transportation or retailing because of IoT?

Rahim Tafazolli: Yes, but not in the same way that telecom business models are changing, because new players are coming in. The most important player is the user because of security and privacy concerns. There is a huge amount of information you can collect about the user. The question is where the information goes and who handles the information. The traditional business models involving manufacturers, operators, subscribers and service providers have to expand to include other new stakeholders. For example, for developing smart homes and smart cities, other types of players involved may be insurance companies, local authorities and different regulators from utility companies. That's why it becomes difficult. It is an extremely multidisciplinary technology. It is not only about telecommunications or electronics, but also involves different regulators, like security and privacy, health, energy etc.. So, monetizing IoT is very challenging.

WinWin: To facilitate the robust development of IoT, what kind of support is required from regulators, vendors, telecom operators, etc.?

Rahim Tafazolli: From users' point of view, there are many stakeholders, such as local authorities and different regulators. One challenge is that different bodies such as the spectrum regulator and utility companies need to work with each other. In addition, we need a global standard for IoT. At the moment, IoT standards are quite fragmented. For example, Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) was codified by the European Telecommunication Standard Institute (ETSI); IPv6 over Low power Wireless Personal Area Networks (6LoWPAN) was codified by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF); IEEE has been providing ZigBee standards. I believe we need to have at least one common globally accepted standard. It would help IoT business and technology to flourish. Otherwise, most IoT networks and applications would be very local and limited.

Besides, with a single data mining or artificial intelligence algorithm shouldn’t be applied in whole range of applications. We need different algorithms for different applications and they need to be customized. Currently, we have a good grasp on most data mining technologies and related algorithms. What we don't have is the common standard in terms of metadata and semantics to describe the information. I don't believe we will have one global semantic description technology or application. We need to specify a basic set of semantic technologies and new semantics will be generated for the future services. That is the big gap between what we have now and what we need for the future as we expect huge diversity of different IoT applications to accommodate different requirements.

Giving IoT room to grow

WinWin: As IoT advancement is tied to connectivity, what is your prediction about network evolution to enabling IoT growth?

Rahim Tafazolli: Most of the applications in IoT generate low data rate and could be extremely time sensitive. We need very quick response time. And if you look at the car as a sensor, it doesn’t always generate a low data rate due to different latency and requirements. We can't flood the network with every piece of generated data. We need different network architecture and hierarchical network architecture with different points in the network for data mining and data processing. Otherwise, the network will be flooded with huge amount of useless data. And we need to do data mining at every stage at sensor and network gateway. We should have a mechanism for structured and unstructured data in order to gain information from metadata. We must also be able to extrapolate information to make projections and predictions. So data handling is extremely important and very challenging when it comes to IoT.

It's very difficult to give the concrete predication of bandwidth requirements of the future. For example, the range of applications including smart metering that sends a few bytes every couple of days depends on the number and spread of the network. But the data would be definitely huge and most of the data is useless and/or only useful for a limited time. We need to do data mining to discover appropriate data in the network and link appropriate data from one application or a sensor to another application more intelligently. We must also look at new search mechanisms, new storage and retrieval systems. In general, that's why information centric networking and content and context based networking are more appropriate in the future.

WinWin: The Internet of Things is still a shocking concept to some people, yet others are already speculating that IoT will not only connect things that obviously need a connection, but that IoT will creep into absolutely everything, even unexpected objects. What do you think?

Rahim Tafazolli: I believe that in the future, only important things will be connected. To put it another way, if things are not important, they will not be connected. It is absolutely right that connectivity is the key to the future and it is not only connecting people but also connecting your fridge, toaster, your cars, smart metering, your building, your offices and even your pen, chair etc. If they are serving people and society, of if they are helpful for growth of the digital economy, they have to be connected.