A cloudy weather forecast might be just what’s needed for the Internet of things

Nowhere is the issue standardization more complex than with the Internet of things. The Internet of Things would need all devices, globally to interconnect to each other and ‘talk’ with each other. One person could have many connections so it is more than connecting ‘humanity’ – since the Internet of things entails a ‘one to many’ relationship between people and devices

How to standardize this? How should we interconnect these devices?

Here, the first approach is to ‘standardise’ everything first – so that it all interoperates. Waiting for such a standard to emerge globally is not a practical option ..

An alternate approach could be to use the cloud to interconnect the Internet of things – hence the belief that a cloudy forecast may well be just what the Internet of things needs

Let us take a step back to explain why this may be the case:

The technology behind the Internet of things itself is not new. As early as 2005, the ITU had created a very comprehensive report on the Internet of things

The Internet of Things is based on three key ideas:
•   Firstly, device processing and storage power increases exponentially
•   Technology becomes smaller and more ubiquitous until technology weaves itself in the very fabric of life. We see the effects of these two trends all around us – with more powerful phones, smaller disk drives etc.
• A third trend driving the Internet of things is the ability of devices to ‘connect and to sense’ i.e. the ability to be intelligent.

The management or harnessing that intelligence derived from devices could lead to many new services and possibilities.

Again, the idea is not new. In the dotcom era, Sun Microsystems tried the same idea with concepts like Jini (Jini is a network architecture for the construction of distributed systems in the form of modular co-operating services.).
There are three business areas which are driving the Internet of things ..  Here, for simplicity – let us treat Internet of Things as any RFID enabled object. So, we have:

1)  Vertical industries (ex Supply chain)
2) Public transportation (ex London Underground) and
3) Mobile phones
(Note the fourth could be the government – but we are considering business domains here)

To understand these areas, we have to understand four specific technologies
EPC, RFID, NFC and the SIM card

EPC: Electronic product codes Is a global numbering scheme to uniquely identify any object in the  world. EPC compliant tags have been used by several RFID rollouts such as from Walmart. EPC is primarily concerned with tracking an object through the Supply chain

RFID Radio-frequency identification (RFID) is an automatic identification method, relying on storing and remotely retrieving data using devices called RFID tags or transponders. There are generally two types of RFID tags: active RFID tags, which contain a battery, and passive RFID tags, which have no battery.

Near Field Communication or NFC, is a short-range high frequency wireless communication technology  which enables the exchange of data between devices over about a 10 centimetre (around 4 inches) distance. Payments, ticketing, smart posters to download more information about an object etc are applications of NFC and finally there is the

SIM card The SIM card A Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) on a removable SIM Card securely stores the service-subscriber key (IMSI) used to identify a subscriber on mobile telephony devices (such as computers and mobile phones).

It would be nice if EPC, NFC, RFID and SIM worked together .. But if only life were so simple ..

For starters, EPC and NFC use different frequencies and they are driven by separate industries with differing motivations and commercial models (RFID – by supply chain; SIM by Telecoms; NFC by Transportation). Also, network layer interconnect i.e. interconnect between physical devices is hard to achieve

This is where the Cloud comes in ..

If each physical object would have co-responding virtual object in the Cloud, then these cloud objects could more easily and globally interconnect on behalf of the  physical object. So, the physical object needs only to connect to the cloud and then it can ‘invoke’ any other object through its corresponding software(cloud) object.

I know that there are limitations to this for example in the capacity of passive RFID tags to interconnect to Cloud .. but still it is a workable idea(in my view).
In the figure, C-O1 is the oftware object for O1 etc etc ..

Thoughts?