BOSTON – The Internet of Things is real, it’s in its infancy and it will be huge—there are just a few big hurdles yet to clear standards and security. That was the conclusion of three panelists speaking on the topic at
DESIGN East here.
“There are a lot of areas that need to come together in standards, and we are not there yet,” said Ken Havens, a marketing manager for the systems design division of ARM.
Among competing standards groups like the
IPSO Alliance,
EnOcean and the
Zigbee Alliance, “some of the walls are coming down around interoperability,” said Mark Grazier a product marketing manager for IoT at Texas Instruments who participates in all three groups.
“They are really starting to liaison with each other, and they quicker they do the faster this will move forward,” said Grazier.
Maturity of standards is also an issue, Grazier noted in a discussion with
EE Times after the panel. For example, the Zigbee Alliance is working on IP support that IPSO already has, meanwhile IPSO is working on the breadth of support for specific device classed Zigbee has already created, he said.
Compliance with still-to-be defined security standards will also be a must, said Glenn Perry, general manager of the embedded software division at Mentor Graphics. In addition, software developers need to do a better job supporting the power-constrained client systems emerging in IoT, he said.
“There’s relatively little focus in the software development community on power optimization,” Perry said. “Software developers aren’t trained in hardware fundamentals, so the whole notion of measuring power is outside their scope and it’s a fairly complex problem,” he said.
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